(2014-01-20, 05:52 PM)frostschutz Wrote:(2014-01-20, 03:40 PM)Ados Wrote: P.S: also, why in the world would anyone nofollow their own internal links?
You can mark internal links (to specific posts or user profiles or reply buttons or ...) as unimportant; although the better option is to block such URLs through robots.txt or to tell Google (Webmaster Tools) to just ignore some parameters (such as pid).
Some sites use referer hiding, in which case you can not easily distinguish internal and external links anymore (when its internal.link?goto=external.link). Do you nofollow those or not?
Why nofollow external links anyway? As long as it's not spam, there is no reason to. If everyone starts to nofollow all the links without exception, the flag loses its purpose.
The Google SEO plugin sets nofollow for X days (to give moderators time to remove any spam posted) and long term all links revert to normal. If you're (still) using this plugin and haven't disabled the nofollow setting, that's probably the reason why you're still seeing nofollow'd links in recent posts / member profiles.
Damn, I was hinting that Google SEO was tagging links nofollow. I have actually just posted in your plugin's thread about it.
I would rather just nofollow instead of doing redirects and blocking with robots.txt. About "nofollow" for external URLs as a default, I somewhat agree with you, but making external links nofollow as default in a forum has plenty of benefits:
1) Discourages manual spammers, and discourages many spammers running Xrumer. No one wants to buy Xrumer lists with forums that have nofollow as per default. A list of forums that AA links in posts for new members is pricey and spammers are willing to pay for that. If I mark my external links as nofollow, whenever a $1/hour Indian VA visits my forum to see if links are AA/followed/moderated/nofollow, he will not put my forum in a Xrumer-blasting list; and I mention "Indian" simply because I know people who run boiler room "SEO" companies (black hat) that have a team of Indian VAs scouting forums 24/7, and this is a very profitable business model via using Indian VAs.
2) Whenever I or someone post links with affiliate tags, the links are automatically made nofollow (and we moderate all links but I allow certain people to post affiliate links). Affiliate links are a grey area when it comes to SEO, but I always nofollow them and have anecdotal evidence that the big G likes that as it could be regarded as a "paid" link.
Of course, if I found a very nice site to link out in the postbit, I'd be cool with leaving the link as a regular followed link, but then such a plugin would require too much coding and I don't know if anyone is up for creating such a plugin from scratch.