Have to agree to disagree with you on the no-follow. A top commenter plugin which follows, rather than no-follows would be preferable to myself than having to wade through Akismet – particularly as spambots become more sophisticated at detecting no-follows.

IMO An approved comment rewards in the form of click through traffic anyway – the additional search engine benefit will become less relevant as search engines detect when a blog is a blog etc, and when a comment link is a comment link.

That said, I’d like to be able to give the people I choose follow love. People like yourself who engage and interact across the web, rather than one time visitors.

Paul.

- Incentivise (Develop ways to reward people who link to you)

I think a good potential incentive is to change the comment links on your blog to “DO Follow” rather than the default “No follow” rule. A plugin for wordpress can make this happen easily and stating it on your blog will let people know that useful and authentic comments will thus be rewarded.

It adds a bit to the admin of the blog but spam is easily spotted. Also you will have control over the comment in the admin post and to deter idiots most bloggers wit hthe “Do Follow” rule simply state that they will change the anchor text in the URL or spam the comment outright which goes towards helping stop these idiots and get them removed or banned from Search Engines even quicker.

My 2 cents :P