How to SEO Optimize Blogger Comments?

In my previous tutorial on BBC (BestBloggerCafe) I tutored about optimizing blogger labels and thus, in this tutorial I'll address optimizing blogger comments. Comments are very important for a blog because they are crawled by search engines. So if a blog is having a lot of comments from the visitors then it is a very good thing. Google and other search engines give importance to the websites or blogs which's posts are commented the most. This shows the popularity and usefulness of a blog. But when people leave bad links in their comments, this becomes a headache for the blogger as well as for search engines. Bad links in comments can destroy your blog and SEO. In general, we keep comments links as nofollow. And nofollow means, we instruct the search engine's crawler to not crawl the link inside comments, but crawl only the content of the comment.

This is the best practice, because you can't give dofollow external links to the commentators. This reduce your Page Rank and can harm your blog's SEO. By default now many platforms including WordPress add nofollow HTML attribute to the comment links, but in Blogger there isn't this setting available  But we can do it manually by ourselves.

How to optimize Blog's comments?

Now here is a simple solution for getting rid of this problem. You'll just have to add an HTML attribute to the comments part of HTML section of your blog. Follow steps below:

1. Login to your blog
2. Template >> HTML >> Proceed >> Check the Expand Widget Templates
3. Now find below piece of code by using CTRL+F

expr:href='data:post.createLinkUrl'

Just replace the above code with given code below:

rel='external nofollow' expr:href='data:post.createLinkUrl'

Save your template and you're almost done!

What we did?

We just added a rel='external nofollow' attribute to the comments of the visitors, so now search engines won't follow the links inside comments. You can only use rel='nofollow' but the external nofollow is better then only nofollow, because sometimes you can insert links indicating to your blog's other pages, so they will be followed by search engines and the rest won't be.

Your Turn:
I'm trying my best to resolve all the issues you're facing while working on blogger, so let me know if you have questions regarding this tutorial... Stay happy and peaceful