Forums and the Nofollow tag/attribute

[rogerd]

Just curious - has anyone made extensive use of the nofollow attribute in their forum, and has it made any difference in the way pages seem to be indexed and/or ranked?

I'm less concerned about user-dropped URLs than the many "junk" links on a typical forum page. On a given thread display page, for example, there may be a reply link (sometimes even one reply link in each message), edit links, profile links, "report this message" links, and so on. Few of these have any value to search engine visitors, so it would be logical to use the rel=nofollow attribute to keep the spiders focused on useful content. Is anyone actually doing this, and if so, are you seeing any changes in the way the site is spidered or ranked?

[Lord Majestic]

so it would be logical to use the rel=nofollow attribute to keep the spiders focused on useful content

IMO "nofollow" is a very misleading name -- spammers spam not because they want spiders to get their content, but because they want to get better rank due to number of links. So, in effect its the ranking issue, not spidering, and therefore attribute should have really be called something else like "norank" or even "PR-1".

Nevertheless its a good idea to support this emerging standard and apply tag to any place where links can be posted by non-owner of the place.

[rogerd]

LordM, you are right in stating that the primary purpose of the tag was to make spamming blogs and forums less attractive. Unfortunately, automated spammers won't be deterred because some percentage of the blogs and forums won't implement the nofollow attribute. The only spammers that might be deterred are the human ones who take the time to look at how a blog or forum handles links; selective human spammers aren't usually a problem, and even they might do it anyway just for the click-generated traffic.

Some web developers use javascript to hide links they don't want spidered - links to user services, etc. It seems like the nofollow attribute could accomplish this without having to worry about visitors with JS disabled.

[linear]

I have robots.txt entries that do the functional equivalent--if a page doesn't have content, it gets a Disallow directive. Stuff like the who's online or memberlist need not get spidered. (IMO-YMMV)

[jamie]

hi rogerd,

i have just added this to our (phpbb) forum. it is a simple mod if anyone wants to sticky me.

our forums are quite popular and people often link to other sites in our niche.

i'll be watching what happens with interest and let you know if anything untoward happens

cheers