Nofollow links in forum threads?

[Patrick Mackaaij]

How about adding rel=”nofollow” to links posted on the WordPress Forum?

https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow

I’m looking into backlinks as Google seems to have a problem with my site and stumbled upon a few links from the forum.

[Andrew Nevins]

I don’t think this will be done as the general idea is to post links on the forum that you’re comfortable with being public (including public to robots like search engines).

Edit: Oops maybe it’s better if I post what Google say about nofollow links instead of misreading it myself!

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

[Patrick Mackaaij]

Thanks for looking into this, Andrew!

It’s not about the link being public. It’s about passing pagerank value.

I’m trying to get clarity from Google about the current use of rel=”nofollow” as they seem to be more strict:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!starred/webmasters/bI4MAooxmFs

Basically, WordPress can’t vouch for any of the links forum visitors post so these should be nofollow. I’ve also asked whether I can look at it like “If you can place or directly influence a link, don’t link.” See for instance what Google’s Matt Cutts asked Twitter to do:
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/twitter-added-nofollow-to-www-links-in-their-bio-field/

Google Groups forums redirect all external links via /url which is disallowed in robots.txt. That’s another way to nofollow.

[Jan Dembowski]

I’m moving this to Requests and Feedback ’cause it’s not really Miscellaneous.

I myself don’t think back links are a big deal (never have, likely never will) but this is feedback. ??

[Patrick Mackaaij]

Thanks. Sorry about the classification. I agree on your comment regarding back links. After my traffic dropped 75% I needed to dive into Google Magic ??

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Sooo…

Nothing’s stopping you from making a nofollow link.

<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example.com</a>

Works ??

Example.com

[Patrick Mackaaij]

The point is nobody having to think about it ??

Somehow my links in this thread are nofollow and the link to the Google forum is now broken. I can’t seem to edit or delete my own posts over here. If you’d like to, I can forward you the URLs of the topics I link from? But that would only solve my specific case…

[Jan Dembowski]

Slightly off topic:

I can’t seem to edit or delete my own posts over here.

After 1 hour you cannot edit your post and for lots of reasons that’s only done by moderators in extreme cases.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Forum_Welcome#Deleting_.2F_Editing_Posts

Backlinks are 100% never “extreme” and those posts are not going to be edited.

I know that you are looking for a change to the forums to do it automatically but really, it’s not a problem those back links. If it is then going forward add rel="nofollow" as mentioned above.

[Patrick Mackaaij]

All backlinks I posted on the web are relevant and not build with link building in mind. I wasn’t focussed on backlinks (or any deeper SEO stuff) until my site’s visitors dropped 75%.

I’m going through all options that sound reasonable and “Google puts heavy weight on links so if you post any pointing to yourself make them nofollow” sounds reasonable.

I discussed a few nofollow cases over at the Google Webmaster Tools forum but nofollowing links in a forum like this has never been questioned:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!starred/webmasters/bI4MAooxmFs

You’d like visitors to just be able to link and not worry about it.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Your site visitors dropping 75% is not likely the result of backlinks from here. Google constantly changes their secret math to sort out rankings. Rarely do people search for yourdomain.com, it’s always for your keywords, and backlinks from forums are weighted appropriately last I heard.

[Patrick Mackaaij]

I know. WordPress is just one of the sites I contact about nofollow (Diigo already fixed things for instance). Nofollow is one of the reasons I contact sites (copying content is another for instance). Contacting sites is just one of my actions, feel free to read along:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!starred/webmasters/zO4-NBo7fs0

Unfortunately, Google let’s us find out we dropped ourselves, doesn’t offer insight and cannot be contacted. Same holds true for YouTube and Gmail. So I’m fixing all that sounds reasonable.

Interesting to see all but the first link in the first comment in this thread are nofollowed. So there must be something in place already.

[Patrick Mackaaij]

Meanwhile I’ve added www.ads-software.com to my disavow list:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

[Andrew Nevins]

That is interesting!