Do comment links help boost or syphon away pagerank?

If the nofollow tag is kept in place for links in your comments (standard config for wordpress), PR shouldn’t be passed on to the linked site.

I read somewhere a claim or belief that having outbound links in people’s comments to other relevant blogs can help boost your blog’s ranking and visitership. I don’t know if this is with or without the ‘nofollow’ tag. Does Google completely ignore such a link, or figure in points towards ranking based on relevancy of the links?
Thanks,
Fred

Having outbound links on your blog helps (targeted), but having them specifically in your comments posts doesn’t give more seo power. My opinion of course, no scientific data at my finger tips ;).

“Does Google completely ignore such a link, or figure in points towards ranking based on relevancy of the links?”

I think google probably follows the link, but doesn’t give it any sort of ‘vote value’ from your blog. This helps protect your blog from ‘voting’ for spammy or bad neighborhood sites that show up in your comments.

It appears the rel=”nofollow” tag is not included in my theme, so if I ever decide to add one in, where should I add it in the Theme editor? Does this tag go in comments.php?

Also there seem to be a couple different variations of this tag. ‘no-follow’, “no-follow”, “nofollow” etc..

Netdetective I don’t think the nofollow depends on themes, it’s built into wordpress itself.

rel=’external nofollow’
rel=”nofollow”

More info from google:

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

Netdetective…comment links will neither hurt nor help your Google Pagerank, particularly since the ‘nofollow’ rule is auto added to outbound links posted by visitors.

Pagerank really isn’t that big of a deal (and hasn’t been for quite some time). It’s just an indicator of how many links point to a page, and a VERY generalized gauge of the authority of those links. If you have a single post page with PR 3 for instance, its Pagerank might fluctuate as it drops and/or gains links…but it will never ‘lose’ or ‘syphon’ off PR to outbound links located on that page.

Where people get confused is that regular static links do ‘pass on’ Pagerank. So that same PR 3 page will pass on more PR influence if you only place a few outgoing links as opposed to a huge list of links, but you can’t create an ever increasing Pagerank loop within your site by ONLY linking to your own pages.

Ultimately your PR is based on inbound links from other sites.