[theforum] nofollow in articles (was Re: New article)

Drs Marcel Feenstra, MALD, MBA marcel at wintasy.com
Tue Oct 16 11:36:27 CDT 2007


Dean Mah wrote:

> For the record.  I add the nofollow attribute manually.  We are running
> an older version of Drupal (pending upgrade) and we did not turn on Drupal
> filtering for this purpose.

Too bad I did not know that... :-(

I spent quite a bit of time looking at the source code (for Drupal 4.7 and
5.2, since I did not know which version is currently being used), and I
contacted one of the Drupal "gurus" earlier today, to ask him if it was
possible to enable "nofollow" for comments, but not for articles. So perhaps
I just wasted his time (as well as mine, but that's OK).

David Kaufman and Dean Mah seem to have somewhat different views of this
matter, then. Dean's statement:

> No, the 'nofollow' attribute is intended.  As a policy, evolt.org 
> has decided to add that to all links.

may be a little "stricter" than other Evolters have intended.

Since I am not an "insider", I feel that it would be a little pretentious
for me to comment on what Evolt's policy "should" be; but as I have stated
before, I *do* think that it is standard practice to give authors proper
credit when their articles are published. (For the record, I wouldn't
publish articles that were nothing but blatant self-promotion!)

The "nofollow" attribute was originally suggested as a way for site owners
to stop spam in comments they could not "police" --to be applied,
automatically, to links that had *not* been "reviewed". Having "nofollow" in
comments makes perfect sense to me.

More recently, Google has started to demand that it be used on "paid links",
so that parties with deep pockets could not "buy" PageRank and/or better
rankings.

However, AFAIK, "nofollow" has *never* been intended for use in texts that
*had* "passed editorial review", and I think it is inappropriate --and a
little unfair towards authors-- to start using it for that purpose.




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