[theforum] nofollow in articles (was Re: New article)
Dean Mah
dean.mah at gmail.com
Tue Oct 16 12:14:44 CDT 2007
Drs Marcel Feenstra, MALD, MBA wrote:
> 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).
The plan is/was to upgrade Drupal so it may not be a waste of time. I
do not know the status of the upgrade. I don't think that any work has
been done on it, however. It was supposed to be rolled out at the same
time as the new design was implemented, IIRC.
> 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;
evolt.org attempts to be an community where there are no "insiders".
Your opinion counts for as much as anyone's in the community.
> but as I have stated
> before, I *do* think that it is standard practice to give authors proper
> credit when their articles are published.
I believe that authors are given proper credit. Off-topic links are
still in articles. Ultimately, I would choose to remove links and text
that did not further the point of the article.
> 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".
Original intent does not matter to me here. Things evolve. The Web
evolves. evolt.org's policy evolves. Tables weren't intended to impose
structure, stuff happens.
> 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.
That's their policy, not evolt.org's policy. We have no control over
what Google demands or decides and so this comment does not seem
relevant to me.
> 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.
See above.
However, please elaborate on about how it is unfair towards authors. I
can be convinced. It would me less work for me in the long run. :)
Dean
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