Comments and backlinks are useful - But beware of the "No Follow" tag.

I added the Terinea Weblog to my Google Reader a few days ago. They have some great tips for business blogging and other popular technologies. Although business is not the goal of my blog, their tips are general enough that I can apply them for my use.

In their post - 100 Readers, Excellent, Thank You! - They mentioned a 'nofollow' tag. I had heard about it, but didn't know much about it. Their statement really got me curious:

Ps Did you know, if you leave five or more quality comments we automatically remove the nofollow tag to your blog site?

Huh? What did that mean?

What is means that is when you comment on someone's blog and leave your link to your website, it is not necessary that a searchengine spider will follow that link back to give you a better page ranking. This is up to the author's discretion. They may or may not have this enabled. You can check the underlying HTML to find the following tag where your url appears:

 <a href="http://www.myBlog.com/" rel="nofollow">

Does this mean you should check every comment you post; to see if you are getting a backlink, otherwise stop posting? Of course not, the blogosphere is a giant conversation, and you should contribute to it. A search engine might not give you any credit, but if real people read your comments and see quality, they are more likely to checkout your website. That's how I found  Terinea Weblog.

Here is Google's stance on noFollow Tags.  And here is a wiki explaination.