In the past I removed the “nofollow” tag on my comments. This was to encourage comments and to reward regular commenters with a link. The problem is that I don’t have time to go check out the website in the comment link and as Google will penalise if I link to a bad neighbourhood I have decided to remove the “dofollow” from comments.
I regularly find dofollow websites in my logs, so people are targeting dofollow websites, which is a good tactic if your strategy is of a certain shade.
I am a very generous linker to sites I think are useful and informative for the reader of my blog and have no problem linking to the good stuff. The idea that you only get a trusted link if you make a comment no longer holds water in my estimation.
Will comments go up? Will comments go down. My feeling is that they will stay the same.
It comes down to one issue. I want 100% control over who gets the trust past on from this blog. You may say I already have the trust as I can delete comments. Yes, technically I do, but I do not want to spend my time doing that, I want to spend it in more lucrative ways like spending more time on Linkbait work for clients.