Not a bug Nofollow reaction links

[nrep]

Affected version

2.1b5

Search engines are trying to crawl and index the /reactions URL on every post, as there's not a nofollow tag on the link. i.e.:

This:

<a class="reactionsBar-link" href="[URL='https://xenforo.com/community/posts/1302227/reactions']/community/posts/123/reactions[/URL]" data-xf-click="overlay" data-cache="false"><bdi>Test</bdi></a>

Perhaps should be:

<a class="reactionsBar-link" href="[URL='https://xenforo.com/community/posts/1302227/reactions']/community/posts/123/reactions[/URL]" data-xf-click="overlay" data-cache="false" [B]rel="nofollow"[/B]><bdi>Test</bdi></a>

This is only a problem for those of us with /posts/ in robots.txt, as search engines can't access the page for the crawler to see the "noindex" header meta entry. However, this is how most of us will have robots.txt set up, including here at XenForo.com

 

[dethfire]

nofollow doesn't prevent crawling, only robots will do that. if you disallow /posts/ then you'll be fine

 

[Chris D]

I'm not convinced there is anything for us to do here. Worth noting that the approach currently is exactly the same as it has been since the very beginning of XF as the issue as reported would have affected the like list links too.

As above, I'm pretty sure that if robots.txt disallows posts then it shouldn't attempt to crawl anyway.