Fixed Markup prefix/label links with rel="nofollow"?

[Steffen]

Affected version

2.0.2

In the thread view, XenForo uses rel="nofollow" for the links of individual posts (e.g. for the date and the post numbers like #1, #2 etc).

In the forum view / thread list, there a prefix/label links (e.g. https://xenforo.com/community/forums/bug-reports-2-x.91/?prefix_id=3) that lead to a page whose canonical URL is set to the non-prefix URL (e.g. https://xenforo.com/community/forums/bug-reports-2-x.91/), i.e. they are not indexed anyway and they don't contain content that isn't available on the non-prefixed URL. Would it make sense to enable rel="nofollow" for those prefix/label links to save some crawl budget?

 

[dutchbb]

I have set rel="nofollow" for the prefixes (xf1) because they have no value to crawl for me. On some forums it can help to discover similar (older) content faster, but with a sitemap and good forum structure not necessary it think. A html sitemap also not for most forum, and xf2 has removed it (quick navigation of xf1).

Google does indeed not index theses url's (most of the time, but they can choose to do so because canonical is only a strong indicator). On xf1 you also had filtering url's in the forums and media. I also nofollowed those for the same reason.

Goto (quoted) posts the same, google does index these sometimes, they can have nofollow but blocking in robots.txt like on xf is also fine. Posts is a little more difficult because it is used on many pages so adding it in robots.txt is easyer. Also these are redirects (301) and this takes more time for google to crawl depending how fast your server responds, and the faster google can go the more pages it crawls.

 

[Chris D]

Seems reasonable, thanks.