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>if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow? To prevent a search engine from poking around links and executing actions meant from human beings. I help som
by ferongr 14y ago
>if you remove spam, what's the use of nofollow?
To prevent a search engine from poking around links and executing actions meant from human beings.
I help someone manage a small online music stream with automatically queued user requests. The community around it is small and nice so there's no need for captchas or authentication. Without nofollow Google and friends would randomly request tracks for playback.
- cbr 14y agoTo prevent a search engine from poking around links and executing actions meant from human beings. That's not how search engines interpret nofollow. You should use robots.txt instead. EDIT: for details, see the original blog post, which says "those links won't get any credit" not "those links will be ignored": http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
- walshemj 14y agoIts how I understand no follow - Used in login and print page links and the like to stop the creation of massive numbers of duplicate pages.
- PavlovsCat 14y agoIt works for that, because it means "disregard this link for ranking". But it doesn't forbid bots from crawling those links anyway, which is what the other poster seems to think it does.
- ferongr 14y agoWell, according to the logs we don't get requests from Google or other kinds of bots so it works for our use case.
- dbaupp 14y agoYou can solve that problem by using POST rather than GET for the playback requests. (I.e. convert each playback request link to a <form> with hidden fields specifying the track info and a "request it" button, or just use ajax and "new XMLHttpRequest('POST')" or whatever is appropriate for the JavaScript library being used.)
- ferongr 14y agoRefactoring 4 years old PHP that spits out quirks mode table-layed HTML via echo... shudder.