[pmwiki-users] rel='nofollow'

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 01:22:01PM -0400, Henrik Bechmann wrote:
> What's rel='nofollow'? A searchbot directive? 

Yes.  A rel='nofollow' attribute of a link tells a search engine
spider not to give that link any weight when computing search engine
rankings.  The purpose of rel='nofollow' is to prevent spammers from
obtaining any benefit from abusing public sites by posting lots of links.

One of the original (and best) pages on the topic is at
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html .

Note that despite the name, the convention does not say that a
link with rel='nofollow' is not to be followed.  It just says the
link should not be given any weight.  Originally Google and others
still followed links that contained rel='nofollow', they just didn't
give the links any weight.  However, since the convention was first
published Google has since said that its spiders will not follow links
that have rel='nofollow'.

>What's the logic of when it is added? 

PmWiki adds the rel='nofollow' whenever there's an external link of
some sort.

>How do I change it? 

Change the value of $UrlLinkFmt .  By default $UrlLinkFmt is

    $UrlLinkFmt =
      "<a class='urllink' href='\$LinkUrl' rel='nofollow'>\$LinkText</a>";

To eliminate the rel='nofollow', add the following to local/config.php:

    $UrlLinkFmt =
      "<a class='urllink' href='\$LinkUrl'>\$LinkText</a>";

> (I have a lot of links to html pages 
> using intermap which are actually internal to the website and which I DO 
> want crawled.)

It's also possible to change the output format for individual InterMap
entries, thus:

    $IMapLinkFmt['PmWiki:'] = 
      "<a class='pmwikilink' href='\$LinkUrl'>\$LinkText</a>";

would set the formatting of PmWiki: InterMap links.  If an InterMap
link doesn't have a custom format set, it uses $UrlLinkFmt.

Pm