Fixed Remove rel="nofollow" attributes from login, register and search form links?

[Steffen]

Affected version

2.0.9

In general, Google recommends not to use rel="nofollow" on internal links: http://www.thesempost.com/google-dont-ever-nofollow-your-own-internal-links/

There may be exceptions where rel="nofollow" on internal links can be useful. I'm thinking about the permalink of each post. (If you have lots of posts then these links could use a significant portion of your crawl budget.)

But I don't see a reason why rel="nofollow" makes sense for links to https://xenforo.com/community/login/, https://xenforo.com/community/register/, and https://xenforo.com/community/search/ which exist in the header and off-canvas menu of XenForo.

If, for some reason, you don't want these pages to be indexed then they should use <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. The attribute rel="nofollow" won't help with that.

 

[Chris D]

Yeah, we discussed this earlier. We're not actually certain why nofollow was added here. We didn't have anything on those links in XF1 and I don't particularly see a need to noindex them either. People may wish to noindex them, but then they can just do that using robots.txt, so we'll just remove those rel attributes, I think. Thanks!