[pmwiki-users] rel='nofollow'

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2006 at 03:10:41PM -0400, Henrik Bechmann wrote:
> Thanks so much, Patrick.
> 
> What you've set up makes perfect sense for most situations, but I happen 
> to use InterMap as an internal list of repositories, rather than an 
> external list of references, and I had just noticed that some of our 
> pages weren't showing up in google, in spite of the fact that we get 
> crawled quite a lot. 

Well, just because something is listed as rel='nofollow' somewhere
doesn't mean it won't show up in Google.  If there are *any* links
to a page that don't have rel='nofollow', then Google should be
indexing it. 

In particular, once Google (or some other spider) crawls a 
RecentChanges page, then all of the pages in a group are candidates 
for being indexed by Google.

> The config entry you've indicated will I presume solve the problem.

Yes, I suspect it will.  I'm wondering if it's worthwhile for
InterMap links to be automatically treated differently from
other urls, instead of having to handle it specially.  Perhaps
an $IMapLinkFmt default value for links read from localmap.txt
or Site.InterMap.

Pm


> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >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
> >
> >  
> 
> -- 
> 
> Henrik Bechmann
> www.osscommons.ca
> www.bechmannsoftware.com
> Webmaster, www.dufferinpark.ca
> 
>