[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #16881: Remove all unwanted 'nofollow' attributes from 'reply to comment' links

[WordPress Trac]

#16881: Remove all unwanted 'nofollow' attributes from 'reply to comment' links
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 Reporter:  joelhardi        |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)     |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:
Component:  Comments         |     Version:  3.1
 Severity:  minor            |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch close  |     Focuses:
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Changes (by joelhardi):

 * status:  closed => reopened
 * resolution:  wontfix =>


Comment:

 Hi ... thanks for the interest in this ticket. However I think the
 original intent of the ticket was lost in the decision to close it out. My
 original proposal was to delete this attribute because it was being
 misused and has no effect on internal links. It's technical debt and a
 waste of bits. It also causes confusion. People think nofollow controls
 crawler behavior, when it doesn't.

 nofollow is meant to be used on external links to avoid them being
 indexed, given PageRank or other mythical SEO pixie dust. You can look at
 the [W3C spec](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#linkTypes) for
 instance.

 Maybe ~8 years or so ago, there was an SEO technique of "pagesculpting" to
 liberally sprinkle rel="nofollow" everywhere, except for a few select
 links, because at the time this resulted in additional relative pagerank
 being applied to those remaining links. Google et al. quickly adjusted and
 have been ignoring "nofollow" on internal links for at least a year or two
 before when I originally submitted this patch. Since then including it on
 these particular links has had no purpose.

 So I 100% agree with @joostdevalk that there is no SEO purpose to adding
 this to these links ... there hasn't been for a long time. That is why I
 want to remove this attribute that is being used for the wrong purpose.
 #22889 is the right way to deal with the ?replytocom crawling issue.

 If you are in favor of retaining the attribute can you please explain why?
 I am perfectly willing to listen.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16881#comment:22>
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