Smart Nofollows

[StarArmy]

I had an idea that I'll throw out there for any mod author looking for ideas:

• An add-on that affects link parsing:
  • If the site has good pagerank, link with a follow link
  • If the site is bad pagerank, rel=nofollow the link
  • If the site is a bad neighborhood/shady site, do not parse the link.
  • Admin panel allows customization of how good a site must be to get a follow link.

I think this would be good for admins who are concerned about pagerank and SEO.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I like this in theory, but is it actually possible to automate?

I would certainly like something that allows admin to manually choose follow or no follow for different links

 

[Fred.]

I would certainly like something that allows admin to manually choose follow or no follow for different links

Me too!

 

[EQnoble]

I like this in theory, but is it actually possible to automate?

I would certainly like something that allows admin to manually choose follow or no follow for different links

It is possible to automate (have worked on something similar not for page rank though)...a request gets sent with a url to be checked and an API sends back the rank, based on the value of one of the pairs you can create automated loops of logic to decide if the link is 'good enough'.

example API response:

(
    [url] => http://xenforo.com
    [rank] => 6
    [instance] => Array
        (
            [timestamp] => 1455336255
            [iso] => 2016-02-13T04:04:15+00:00
        )
    [reqid] => 6fJ7u6df2k
)

I feel however that in the end there is nothing better than letting a human decide if something else is crap or not.

 

[StarArmy]

I feel however that in the end there is nothing better than letting a human decide if something else is crap or not.

While that's true, humans don't scale well and manually going through every external link on my forum sounds like a nightmare.

 

[EQnoble]

No doubt but on the other side of that token letting a simple algorithm alone decide if something is worthy or not can be kind of crap to the community posting links on your site and that's the only reason I bring up the point of humanism over algorithm.

A person posting a link may have literally just created the best site on earth yesterday thus has no ranking and while their link doesn't make the cut, a persons link that has a good page rank but has absolutely no value to your community or the purpose behind it will be in the mix with the good.

There are ways to do automated and still allow for a human to backtrack automated choices with ease when it suits, but the setting up of a system like that could be quite an undertaking and probably wouldn't be something you see whipped up in a couple weeks or a month.

Nothing wrong with the idea, I'm just pointing out what I think could be issues because that is what I do and what anybody does before designing something new (I hope).

 

[StarArmy]

A person posting a link may have literally just created the best site on earth yesterday thus has no ranking and while their link doesn't make the cut, a persons link that has a good page rank but has absolutely no value to your community or the purpose behind it will be in the mix with the good.

Yes, but what matters in terms of SEO is that you link to good sites and not to bad ones. Failing to give a good site a "follow" link is fine. It's always okay to "not" link a site, but it's not okay to link to a bad site.

Traditionally the course has been to just nofollow everything, but there's got to be a smarter way.

I think the hardest part of making this idea work is there may need to be some sort of API/app set up because the forum is going to need to check something to see what the link's quality and/or pagerank score is. The question is: where can that data be pulled from?

 

[gfc]

Just another thought: why not let the reputation of the user decide if nofollow or not? I mean if someone has > 500 posts or 20 thanks etc it is unlikely that he is a spammer.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I don't believe Pagerank means anything any more, as it was used by link sellers and spammers.

 

[StarArmy]

Just another thought: why not let the reputation of the user decide if nofollow or not? I mean if someone has > 500 posts or 20 thanks etc it is unlikely that he is a spammer.

You could link it to a promoted user group perhaps. It would require an ACP permission for "follow links."

However just because a user has been around a while doesn't mean he won't link to porn, etc.

 

[Kerby]

I'm not sure but, probably you could instead of preventing bad SEO links by an addon, just use one of the SEO monitoring services out there to scan your page for bad SEO links and hint you if a link needs to be viewed.