XF 1.2 Nofollow?

[RobParker]

Just looking for a bit of advice on this.

We've just had an email from a national newspaper's website saying:

While analyzing links pointing to our website we noted that your website includes potentially unnatural anchor text and links pointing back to certain pages on our website.

Unfortunately, search engines like Google now view these types of links as manipulative and are currently downgrading rankings for websites using this strategy. With that in mind, we’re asking you to please nofollow links OR, if a nofollow is unable to be put in place, we regretfully request you consider removing any links pointing to our website so we (and you) might avoid any possible ranking penalizations.

As far as I'm aware, all external links from XF are already nofollow, aren't they? Does that include links imported from VB?

(We're still on 1.2 if that affects the answer)

Cheers

 

[Chris D]

Links posted by staff are never nofollow.

 

[RobParker]

Links posted by staff are never nofollow.

Is that literally anyone who shows up on the staff list? So admins, mods, etc?

That would probably account for some of it. I noticed a few addons that change this but any recommendations and any reason why we wouldn't want to make them all nofollow?

 

[Chris D]

It's an interesting issue.

I've never known a website have a problem with another website linking to their content before. Usually that's a good thing for them.

I believe it is anyone who is an actual moderator or administrator. I'm not 100% sure, but I think if a normal user is marked as staff then they remain as nofollow.

There is an add-on that allows you to set a whitelist of sites and otherwise change the nofollow value for certain users and groups. I have one that's more basic that won't do what you want. I think the other one might be by *******.

 

[RobParker]

Cheers

I see a lot of discussions on here about removing the nofollow but not about adding to staff links.

 

[Chris D]

I think this is the add-on I was thinking of:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/*******-auto-link-replacer.1529/

I'm not 100% sure if it does what you would need though.

 

[RobParker]

Looks like that would work I think. It looks like I could search for "dailymail.co.uk" and then add nofollow to any links that contain it.

@*******?

 

[dethfire]

According to Matt Cutts all UGC links should be nofollow