[pmwiki-users] notice of current edit

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Apr 14 16:45:56 CDT 2005


On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 11:31:23PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >
> >There's another important aspect to this:  in looking through pmwiki.org's
> >server logs recently, I've noticed that a lot of edit links get triggered
> >by search engines.
> 
> Shouldn't this be prevented by rel="nofollow"?
> That's an attribute that should be added to most (if not all) action links.
> 
> Though I'm not sure how many spiders are well-behaved in this way 
> already. It's a relatively new convention.

Well, Google's definition of rel="nofollow" [1] doesn't say anything
about whether or not a search engine will follow the link.  It simply
says that such links won't get any credit when ranking the website.

Knowing Google's philosophy, I'd fully expect Googlebot to go ahead
and follow the links if only so Google can increase its search
database.  Whether or not it chooses to index the page would then
depend on what the link target reports via robots.txt or the robot's
<meta> tag.  I'd guess that other search engines will continue to do
the same.

Skin designers can put the rel='nofollow' links on action links if
desired, but I really expect spiders to continue to follow them for
a long time to come.

Pm

[1] http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html



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