I found this coming in from Drupal planet http://www.tech-wanderings.com/drupal-nofollowed-too-pervasive.
Greg Holsclaw talks about how nofollow attributes could be hurting Drupal (rel=nofollow being a well intentioned way of deterring spam. Something that has managed to keep the ratio of spam to real content on the web down to a respectable 10:1 :P) Basically, he points out that most internal links on drupal.org get the nofollow attribute attached to them.
Greg makes a number of good points, but I think the two most important are:
1) People complain that it is hard to determine which of a group of similar contributed modules one should pick without knowing which is popular / widely used / supported etc. If internal links on Drupal.org don't count as 'votes' (in search engine ranking) for projects it makes it that much harder for newbies to find the 'right' module for the right job.
2) The Drupal community does a good job of posting valuable case studies and other toot-drupal's-own-horn content ON drupal.org that in turn gets linked to within drupal.org.... and once again the wisdom of the crowd is not harnessed to bump those articles /forum posts / book pages up the search engine rankings.
Should the filter be re-written to NOT nofollow internal links? Or in plainer English, should we have all internal links followed by search engines?
I know the answer will come in the form of a patch (accepted or rejected) - but what say you all?
andre
p.s. I don't think there is any argument about external links... they shouldn't be followed... I'm just talking about internal drupal.org links.
Comments
Now, that is an interesting
Now, that is an interesting finding! From my knowledge I'd say: yes, internal links containing the nofollow attribute have definitely a negative impact on SERPs.
However, url filter is part of core. You should definitely file a bug report against D6, so drupal.org may benefit from this fix after porting it to 6.x.
[EDIT] Additionally, I would also consider to remove the attribute from all links. IMHO, the webmaster/moderation team is doing a really good job in keeping out spam. So (followed) external links to other sites would also increase Drupal's ecosystem regarding SERPs. Many links are pointing to relevant resource pages like PHP, MySQL, and the like. If SEs would also take these links into account for d.o's relevance, that would probably gain us even more popularity.
Daniel F. Kudwien
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Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
discussed - patch needed
This has been discussed - all that's needed is a patch that will skip the nofollow for links within a site. It should be dynamic so that it can be accepted into core.
Nofollowlist is not really a good fix for this because Drupal.org doesn't like to rely on contrib wherever possible.
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Easy problem - tough solution
I looked at what it would take.
The algorithm to make this dynamic is dead simple - but implementing it is tough.
Basically, you have to parse a link to see if it is internal or external - but I think it would be safe to assume that a sub-domain is internal as well.
Given a domain example.com, http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://foo.bar.example.com and /foo/bar would all be considered internal. So you have to parse domains - and extract 'example.com' as the base domain that all other links will be compared to.
Only problem is that I don't know of an elegant way to parse domains without hard coding a list of all TLDs (com, org etc), ccTLDs (.ca, .us, .uk, .au etc) AND (this is the real killer) all 2LD.ccTLD combinations (co.uk, on.ca, biz.my etc.). I compiled a list - but there are hundreds and hundreds of entries - and this list isn't authoritative.
(the reason you need this is to decide if a domain starts at the second level or the third level - foo.example.com is simple - foo.bar.example.ba.in is tougher - is the domain example.ba.in or ba.in?)
The less dynamic variation is an admin or settings file setting. $domain = example.com.
andre
Well there's this new
Well there's this new external link module implemented as a filter (as opposed to the js extlink module). Not tried it but could be a start: http://drupal.org/project/elf
Suffers the same problem
Its okay - but not perfect. If you look at the code all it checks the URL of the page being viewed and bases its decisions off of that.
If you're looking at http://example.com then http://www.example.com is considered external - but really we know its not external.
andre
As a drupal newbie, the
As a drupal newbie, the inadequate google results for modules and help sections on the site are something that was particularly conspicuous when starting out - this is a rather plausible explanation!
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