[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:  new
 Priority:  normal                        |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Comments                      |     Version:  3.1
 Severity:  minor                         |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch commit 2nd-opinion  |
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Comment (by joelhardi):

 Not exactly ... canonical isn't meant to stop double indexing, it just
 provides info that Google uses when determining how to return results. See
 [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
 here].

 Also, it's a recent Google creation, not (yet) a standard.

 If you don't want your pages '''crawled,''' the robots exclusion standard
 is the one you want to use. That's precisely what it's for, and Google
 established nofollow and canonical for other, different reasons.

 The noindex meta tag will mean the pages aren't indexed/stored. Will it
 eliminate crawling? No, since the pages have to be downloaded for the meta
 tag to be read. But, it may still significantly ameliorate the crawling
 problem -- we haven't actually implemented it so we don't know, but my
 guess is that Googlebot at minimum isn't going to re-crawl these URLs as
 frequently.

 So, I think adding the noindex to these pages is an appropriate
 improvement regardless of whatever the links to these pages look like.

 The obvious solution to totally stop unwanted crawling is `Disallow:
 /*/?replytocom=` in robots.txt. When the "correct" fix is such a trivial
 webmaster task, I don't think it's a good idea for !WordPress to do lots
 of incorrect things to try to mimic the same function. It shouldn't abuse
 HTTP or nofollow specs the way it was doing with nofollow, or would be
 doing with POST to simulate links.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16881#comment:9>
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