MyBB

This is a very simple plugin inspired by this thread http://community.mybboard.net/thread-54438.html that adds rel="nofollow" to links in posts.

This is useful for SEO as it reduces outbound links and keeps search engine spiders on site.

If you have any other ideas to improve this plugin let me know.

Cheers.

This should be very popular

Yeah as soon as I saw your post I was like how could this not already be a plugin!

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One little bug I just found is because of the way I replaced it if you post for example

<a href="test" target="_blank">

It will output:

<a href="test" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">

Of course this wont be much of an issue as it is rare that someone would post <a href="test" target="_blank">.

I did it by searching for the target="_blank" because there wasn't a hook located where the URL would normally be formatted. Can anyone suggest a better way of doing this?

(2009-08-09, 09:49 AM)TimB. Wrote: This is useful for SEO as it reduces outbound links and keeps search engine spiders on site.

Be careful not to misunderstand the purpose of nofollow. The only purpose is to not give PageRank to the linked site, e.g. if it's a spammers or fraud site. It's useful if you have spammers in your forum (which you shouldn't have thanks to captcha, moderators, etc.) or if you consciously link to such a site to warn people (e.g. if you're a blogger who informs about latest spammers/frauds activities).

It does not keep search engine spiders on site either. The number of outbound links you have on your page does not change the amount of time spiders spend on your page - if it worked that way nobody would be making outbound links. Spiders are not humans who click on an outbound link and never come back. They'll crawl your entire site regardless.

Nofollow links are not useful in general; quite the opposite, it hurts sites that are linked to (they don't get pagerank even though they got a perfectly valid link) and in the long run it hurts yourself (if the links back to you are nofollow as well). If everyone uses nofollow for everything, everyone loses.

If you want a recommendation from me, I'd suggest two things for your forums nofollow needs:

1) make a mycode [badurl] that behaves like [url], but makes a permanent nofollow link. It should also visibly look different from other links, like having a red background or exclamation mark in front or something so people see that it's a bad link without clicking on it. This way people could write things like "Be careful, [badurl]http://spammers[/badurl] is a spammers site, don't go there". Although wether it should be a link at all then is debateable.

2) make links nofollow, but only for postings/edits that are younger than X days. X being a low number that your moderators need to moderate postings (remove spam, or unwanted links).

This way new postings (which could possibly be spam) would be nofollowed, but old postings (which were not removed by moderators and therefore presumably okay) would use normal links.

However even if you do make it like that, it has very little purpose or effect.

*Sigh* You see this is why I don't normally comment on SEO because everyone has a different view. I have herd from some very respected people pretty much the opposite of what you said. Now I am not saying that they are right or you are right because I don't know, I only created this plugin because because it will be useful to some people. If you feel it will help your site then use it.

Yes, I know, I get that a lot too with my Google SEO plugin, even though I'm trying my best to make decisions based on "facts" (provided by offical Google docs) and not "views" (as in personal opinions or things heard from others).

Google explains nofollow like this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters...swer=96569

In both text and video they say that it's a good thing to /not/ use nofollow for links posted by trusted users; which is basically what I was trying to say in my earlier post just with a lot of more words.

And the main reasons to use nofollow (untrusted user comments, comment spam in guestbooks) do not really apply to MyBB forums since MyBB already does plenty to prevent and fight spam (captcha, moderation, it even comes with akismet as automatic anti spam plugin although I don't have the need to use that).

The only thing I would use nofollow myself for is "Crawl prioritization", which may be what you had in mind when you said it keeps search engine spiders on site. However that crawl prioritization only works for links to your own site - such as "register here" or "sign in" or "sort", things that Google not need to follow. However, robots.txt is the more powerful option to block those.

I dont know how this plugin works, but this simple modification adds nofollow to the posts links, this is really good to reduce outbound links.

http://community.mybboard.net/thread-54438.html

(2009-08-09, 12:43 PM)rafaweb Wrote: I dont know how this plugin works, but this simple modification adds nofollow to the posts links, this is really good to reduce outbound links.

http://community.mybboard.net/thread-54438.html

Did you read the first post? I said that I based this plugin on that post and that post was why I made it.

Sorry to bump an old thread, but does this make ALL links nofollow including links in posts by members and their signatures?

It should work for any links that are put through the MyBB parser, for example user titles won't be effected but signatures and PMs should.