Please Help with Question About Nofollow/Dofollow and Blog Comments

I am seeing so much conflicting information on these subjects and was hoping someone could help clarify for me. I'm rather new to blogging and/or Wordpress.

I have I guess at this point what would be considered a mini-blog -- 20 posts and 8 pages -- but I'm trying to add a post a week. I try to put at least two outgoing links to authority sites on each blog post.

My first question is:

Should my blog be dofollow or nofollow and why?

My second question is:

Is there any downside to disabling comments on the blog. I had comments enabled and all I was getting was people posting comments just to put their link in. (Which I'm not criticizing because I know this is a common practice, but I don't think it's helping my blog any.)

Any input on these two issues would be most helpful.

 

Do not use nofollow in your posts. I suppose you trust these sites you link to.
I have nofollow comments but I link in sidebar to 5 most active authors of comments.

I think this is the best way.

 

Making your blog "Do Follow" only attracts webmasters and bloggers looking to spam for back links.

Most regular readers, don't have websites and have no idea what "Do Follow" means.

If someone is interested in your content and wants to interact, it won't matter to them if your blog is "Do Follow" or "No "Follow.
The community spirit of making your blog "Do Follow" is over...too much spam.

The downside of disabling comments is that you loose the ability to interact with real readers. Don't let comment spammers make you disable comments if you don't want to. Use a good spam plug in like Akismet and set your comments to admin approval.

 

Rightly said Astral Walker !! but comment counts too give a good impression to first timers !!

 

My blog has been Dofollow for a long time. Sure, spammers try to make worthless comments just for the link but they quickly get deleted.

The advantage of not allowing comments is that you don't have to deal with spammers.
The disadvantage of not allowing comments is that you miss out on interacting with your readers and you miss out on all that extra user generated content that Google loves..

 

its personal preference... i use dofollow and nofollow on some... dofollow can create more comments... just more work because you get more spammers...

 

Well, you can always use an antispam plugin like Akismet, Invisible Defender or Spammer Blocker.