Lack of interest SEO Fix

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Brent W

Well-known member
All sorting URLs should be no followed.

For example:

HTML:
    <dl class="sectionHeaders">
        <dt class="posterAvatar"><a><span>Sort by:</span></a></dt>
        <dd class="main">
            <a href="forums/general-golf-talk.2/?order=title" class="title"><span>Title</span></a>
            <a href="forums/general-golf-talk.2/?order=post_date" class="postDate"><span>Start Date</span></a>
        </dd>
        <dd class="stats">
            <a href="forums/general-golf-talk.2/?order=reply_count" class="major"><span>Replies</span></a>
            <a href="forums/general-golf-talk.2/?order=view_count" class="minor"><span>Views</span></a>
        </dd>
        <dd class="lastPost"><a href="forums/general-golf-talk.2/?direction=asc"><span>Last Message &darr;</span></a></dd>
    </dl>
 
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Mmmm... I'd disagree. "nofollow" doesn't do what the name implies... a spider is going to spider it even if it's nofollow (and include it in search results depending on the search engine), it just stops the value of that link being passed along for ranking purposes.

On top of it, you can't use nofollow to do PageRank sculpting anymore, so you ultimately gain nothing from nofollowing those links, and only take away from the "link juice" of those URLs. You actually (slightly) hurt your own site as far as PageRank goes because you just revoked those sort page's PageRank value, but also didn't retain it for other pages.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Matt Cutts said:
So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

How individual search engines treat nofollow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow#Interpretation_by_the_individual_search_engines
 
What is a better alternative? Robots.txt? When I was using vBSEO with vBulletin I had all sorting URLs no followed (I believe that even comes enabled by default on vBSEO).
 
I have made a few tests by searching for thread sort URLs:

Code:
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/xenforo-pre-sales-questions.5/?order=post_date
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/announcements/?direction=asc
http://xenforo.com/community/forums/suggestions-tweaks-small-features.18/?order=view_count

None of them are indexed by Google. So "nofollow" them would be pointless. I think xenforo already tells search engines by default not to follow and or index those URLs in some way.
 
What is a better alternative? Robots.txt? When I was using vBSEO with vBulletin I had all sorting URLs no followed (I believe that even comes enabled by default on vBSEO).
Honestly you don't have to do anything... Google already understands that they are a different ordering of the same content. Google will index it (and be able to pick up threads it might not have seen on other orderings as easily), but it usually won't present the alternate orders within search results.

If it makes you feel better though, you can go into Google Webmaster Tools under Configuration -> URL Parameters and tell it exactly what the "order" parameter is for. But you really don't need to. Google is very smart out of the box. :)
 
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