Xenforo and Google

Markos

Well-known member
I don't see in the code the "nofollow" attribute in the links to profiles, members area, and other "non pertinent" pages. It's easy to do this changes with the nofollow or the robots.txt, but why don't do it to default?
 
i guess they would do it for stable v1. they should!

or they can just ship a bundled robots.txt file.

i actually asked them to disable indexing of member pages so that site search through google becomes more usable of this forum.

i initially had too much problem finding threads. i still have!

btw. member pages are now not supposed to be indexed as they now have noindex in the meta tag i believe.

update.... member pages are indexed. search result pages are not. me bad.
 
They should still include nofollow on links that don't really have a reason for being followed.
Maybe the option vs. actual implementation. SE's don't respect nofollow like people think, and even Google state this themselves. Google state that will review the nofollow attribute, but overall they decide whether to follow it or not. Google DO respect the robots.txt as it is the legal method on how they respect privacy laws for people who do not want their pages indexed. These laws have zero to do with nofollow though, and they only state they MAY respect your wish, otherwise they pretty much WILL make up their own mind.

Robots.txt is the only official way in which they MUST respect in order to comply with International laws provided to website owners to stop an SE spidering and indexing their content against their wish.
 
I don't see in the code the "nofollow" attribute in the links to profiles, members area, and other "non pertinent" pages. It's easy to do this changes with the nofollow or the robots.txt, but why don't do it to default?
Why should profiles not be indexed or followed?

The only thing I would use nofollow for is for pages that need to stay private and/or can't be accessed by guests anyway.
 
Why should profiles not be indexed or followed?

The only thing I would use nofollow for is for pages that need to stay private and/or can't be accessed by guests anyway.

Privacy, in UE there are a law (i link) for that...the profiles should be private, and viewable only for others members.
 
People are just completely confused about nofollow IMHO, so here it is straight from Google, who lets face it, are the only ones we care about for anything SE related:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569 said:
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 said:
A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. These bots are automated, and before they access pages of a site, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages. (All respectable robots will respect the directives in a robots.txt file, although some may interpret them differently. However, a robots.txt is not enforceable, and some spammers and other troublemakers may ignore it. For this reason, we recommend password protecting confidential information.)
You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one).

See the key differences? Nofollow means nothing other than a directive a search engine may or may not follow / listen too, and it doesn't keep pages out of the index. A robots file MUST be respected by search engines, not spammers obviously, and WILL keep your pages out of the search engines, whether linked to or not. SE's must obey a robots.txt... they don't have to obey a nofollow.
 
Alors, i fatigue to explaining me (my english is worse), but i try... for seo purposes, the nofollow is important to tell Google that this link it's not relevant. Use no "This link it's not regarding the content/thematic of my website, please don't follow it". If i have a community about videogames, a profile, or registration page, have nothing correlation with the thematic of the website.
Another thing: many links a website has, less pagerank this link passes. The nofollow is useful to distribuite the pagerank and the "attention" of Google on thematic content (posts...).

For seo purposes, it's important to use both, robots.txt for non index the non-relevant content, and nofollow to tell a Google do not consider/count this link (many seo experts suggest to not have in page over to 100 links...and to use nofollow to a better use of "link juice")

If you are not familiar with seo, you do not know that. If you see the major webmaster forums, the indexing of profiles, and non-relevant content is disallowed.

But this is only a digression...i have a little mistake in my first post, but i have writed "or the robots.txt"...please turn on the principal suggestion of the topic ->why don't disallow indexing of non-relevant (For seo purposes and "privacy") pages?
 
indexing of profiles and non-relevant content is nofollowed because of the general perception that it leaks your site's primary page PR to those not so relevant pages.

the devs are right. nofollow was originally launched to discourage comment spam and link irrelevant sites from your pages.

to block indexing of irrelevant pages, robots.txt is the proper method. though it does not hurt to have nofollow on profile page links (optional). and of course external links (optional).

vbseo does it wonderfully. and i believe some mods would be developed for the same. a lot of folks would want third party links on their forum posted by users of the forum to be nofollowed (with an optional whitelist). i know i do!
 
Except that we want profile pages indexed by search engines. Unless they are specifically set as private by the admin or their owners, why wouldn't you? They are a rich source of content.
 
They are a rich source of content.
Sorry, but I fail to see how. Let's take your profile here on xenforo.com for example (paraphrasing here):

"keep up the good work"
"how do i buy this software?"
"great job, this is what vb4 was supposed to look like then!"
"you're perfect"
"were you in <town> today?"

I don't see how these are good content, while I agree that the other tabs have some good content, the "Profile Posts" tab doesnt generally have stuff you want in the SE's.
 
Sorry, but I fail to see how. Let's take your profile here on xenforo.com for example (paraphrasing here):
Google would not dismiss profile pages as useless or irrelevant content IF the profile page allows unique content and discussions to be posted... which most forum software does nowadays. Useless page are duplicate content shown a different way, advanced posting / interface pages for interacting with the software, that does not produce something unique and individual.

If the page fits that... then Google wants it and you should feed it to Google. Google will decide what they show and dismiss.
 
People are just completely confused about nofollow IMHO, so here it is straight from Google, who lets face it, are the only ones we care about for anything SE related:

See the key differences? Nofollow means nothing other than a directive a search engine may or may not follow / listen too, and it doesn't keep pages out of the index. A robots file MUST be respected by search engines, not spammers obviously, and WILL keep your pages out of the search engines, whether linked to or not. SE's must obey a robots.txt... they don't have to obey a nofollow.

I was always under the impression, that while robots like Google will still follow nofollow links, what they don't do if you use them. They don't pass on page ranking as much to other sites. Meaning in SE terms, your site keeps better page ranking, rather than losing it to another site if you don't use nofollow attribute on links.
 
Sorry, but I fail to see how. Let's take your profile here on xenforo.com for example (paraphrasing here):

"keep up the good work"
"how do i buy this software?"
"great job, this is what vb4 was supposed to look like then!"
"you're perfect"
"were you in <town> today?"

I don't see how these are good content, while I agree that the other tabs have some good content, the "Profile Posts" tab doesnt generally have stuff you want in the SE's.

And twitter for example isn't?
 
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