Just say NO(follow) to Wikipedia Links!

Submitted by greggles on

Wikipedia is going to use the nofollow for all external links on their site. Well that's just crazy talk. They need a better solution than this and while I'm not entirely sure what the better solution is, the solution definitely isn't to just nofollow everything. Honest editors of wikipedia pages are now denied one of the few ways that Wikipedia can "give back".

The Lazy SEO Webmaster Way to Nofollow your Wikipedia Links

So, let's say that you are a lazy webmaster. You don't want to go back and edit all of your wikipedia links to add the nofollow attribute to them. So, what do you do? You write a little filter for Drupal (you build all your sites in Drupal, right? You don't? Well just hire me to do that for you then...) So yeah, you create a filter for Drupal that will filter all of your wikipedia links to add a nofollow tag.

The irony of the nofollowlist module

To me, the irony of the nofollowlist module is that it implements something basically like what Wikipedia needs. If they could create a list of spammer sites (let's call it a blacklist) and then filter against that blacklist then their problem is solved. Brilliant!

Download, Compatibility, and Install

I'm not sure this thing really belongs in the contrib area on Drupal.org. If folks want me to add it I will, but until then just download it from this page. Oh yeah, and it's only tested with Drupal5 though a 4.7 version would probably be trivial (if it doesn't work already).

You can now get it from the project page on drupal.org

To install - enable the module on admin/build/modules, visit your admin/settings/filters and add this to the appropriate filters.

Category: 
Drupal
People Involved: 
Greg
timeline: 
future

Comments

Caleb replied on Permalink

This is ironic

...since Drupal.org does nofollow on all of their links too. Well, at least all of their links except on a very few pages that is.

greggles's picture greggles replied on Permalink

not really

Drupal.org is a mix of nofollow and no-nofollow. Users with the right permissions can set them to whatever they want (which could be one alternate solution for wikipedia as well).

SnowLprd replied on Permalink

Thanks a bunch for the

Thanks a bunch for the contribution. I think it would be great if this were added to the Modules list on Drupal.org. Hope to see it there soon!

Ryan replied on Permalink

Hey Greg, just wanted to

Hey Greg, just wanted to bring to your attention that I patched the module to have a settings form so you can add hosts to the list and mark it as either a blacklist or a whitelist. Thanks for doing all the hard work for us. : )

Anonymous replied on Permalink

Wikipedia very likely has a

Wikipedia very likely has a huge problem with spam, so their decision to add nofollow to external links is comprehensible. Same applies for drupal.org where most external links are nofollowed too.
Of course this cannot be the final solution, since valuable resources may be completely ignored by search engines. Hyperlinks are a fundamental feature of the Web. Imagine all webmasters would nofollow external links.
The whitelist / blacklist approach makes sense for smaller sites, but for sites like Wikipedia such lists would have a huge number of entries, probably resulting in slowing down processing too much. Automated approaches can help, but they do not free webmasters from moderating content.

Haroun Kola replied on Permalink

I want a dofollow

I'm looking for the opposite solution. Giving my commentators the opportunity of getting link love back to their sites when they comment on my posts. Is there a module that does this or how can I remove the nofollow from the comments section in my drupal site?

greggles's picture greggles replied on Permalink

hard to say exactly...

The nofollowlist also has a whitelist now...but I guess that's not what you need.

If your Drupal site is adding "nofollow" to links then you should look for it in the input formats section: http://example.com/admin/settings/filters/

One of those probably has an option enabled which is setting the nofollow. If it's not that...please include a link to your site and and describe which of the links on the page is nofollow that you wish was dofollow and I'll try to help.

Stephenie replied on Permalink

Removing NoFollow from Comments

Hi! Thanks for this module, it is great. However I see the question of removing the nofollow from the comments section hasn't been addressed yet. I, too, would love to know how to do this.

Thanks!

KiamLaLuno replied on Permalink

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The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be indexed by search engines.

The second mistake was more simple: the name. “nofollow” emphasises the fact that Google would not follow such links when calculating PageRank. This gives the impression that Google would not follow the links at all, and would somehow marginalise the linked websites.