View the source of any page with a posted URL or a signature.

CTRL-F for nofollow. :)

thanks.

ADDON "HACK":You can also add the "no index and no follow" rule to each page header as well as the URL.

Go to your admin control panel, and open the style manager, and choose to edit the headinclude template and look for:

and add the following AFTER:
if you want to have the page indexed, but still have the no follow rule stay in effect use this instead:

Interesting. :)

Not to criticise your modification but I'd say this was a poor way of implementing this. As soon as you put no follow on the links it'll:

Also your addon will mean google will not try to index the page. Maybe I'm missing something here but why on earth would you not want the search engines to index your page. The only usage for this will be on blog comment pages. Just because a spambot sees your link having rel="no follow" inside of it will not mean it won't spam the email.

*seethes at criticism* :)

But seriously...it's not spambots that are 'targeted' by this hack, it's the Spammers that send them out.

The theory goes that if people were to implement this idea, there would be no reason for the Spammers to send out the bots in the first place. At least, it removes the advantage of having PR from the sites they are spamming be added to their site.

How would you go about implementing this?

regarding the addon: I don't know why he is suggesting to have noindex in the header of each page...not something I would do myself.

Not to hijack the thread, but there are many good reasons not to be indexed, but it is up to each person to decide if they want to or not. That is why I gave the alternate of only including the "no follow" meta tag instead of having both the no index and no follow. It seems to me that doing one without doing the other (including the no follow in the URL, but not in the meta) is only half of the solution.

You can also tell the spider to ignore only specific parts of your site in a few different ways. One way is to use a "robots.txt" file. The robots.txt is a TEXT file (not HTML!) which has a section for each robot to be controlled. Each section has a user-agent line which names the robot to be controlled and has a list of "disallows" and "allows". Each disallow will prevent any address that starts with the disallowed string from being accessed. Similarly, each allow will permit any address that starts with the allowed string from being accessed. The (dis)allows are scanned in order, with the last match encountered determining whether an address is allowed to be used or not. If there are no matches at all then the address will be used.

Using a robots.txt file is easy. If your site is located at:
http://domain.com/mysite/index.html
you will need to be able to create a file located here:
http://domain.com/robots.txt

Here's an example:

In this example the following addresses would be ignored by the spider:

and the following ones would be allowed:

It is also possible to use an "allow" in addition to disallows. For example:

This robots.txt file prevents the spider from accessing every cgi-bin address from being accessed except Ultimate.cgi and forumdisplay.cgi.

Using allows can often simplify your robots.txt file.

Here's another example which shows a robots.txt with two sections in it. One for "all" robots, and one for the FreeFind spider:

In this example all robots except the FreeFind spider will be prevented from accessing files in the cgi-bin directory. FreeFind will be able to access all files (a disallow with nothing after it means "allow everything").

Examples:

To prevent FreeFind from indexing your site at all:

To prevent FreeFind from indexing common Front Page image map junk:

To prevent FreeFind from indexing a test directory and a private file:

To allow let FreeFind index everything but prevent other robots from accessing certain files:

Here are some more examples:

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/ignore.html
prevents that file from being included in the index.

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/archive/*
prevents everything in the "archive" directory from being included in the index.

The exclusion:
/archive/*
prevents everything in any "archive" directory from being included in the index regardless of the site it's on.

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/*.txt
prevents files on "mysite.com" that end with the extension ".txt" from being included in the index.

The exclusion:
*.txt
prevents all files that end with the extension ".txt" from being included in the index regardless of what site they're on.

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/alphaindex/?.html
prevents a file like "http://mysite.com/alphaindex/a.html" from being indexed, but would allow a file "http://mysite.com/alphaindex/aardvark.html" to be indexed.

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/alphaindex/?.html index=no follow=yes
prevents a file like "http://mysite.com/alphaindex/a.html" from being added to the index but would allow the spider to find and follow the links in that page.

The exclusion:
http://mysite.com/endwiththis.html index=yes follow=no
allows that file to be added to the index but prevents the spider from following any of the links in that file.

you could say that about alot of the mods here, but each little addon or mod is like a lesson in the workings of php and vbulletin, so I find it interesting. I am sorry if it bothers you, but hopefully some other people will find it interesting or helpful.
well, maybe you can't but obviously others can, and desire that function, thus the "rules." I did not invent the meta tags. You are correct that bots don't always play by the rules, but some do, and these are the ones that this hack was addressing.

Actually....ya know what - forget about the "no index" option... forget I even mentioned it- this hack was about the "no follow" so if you are planning on implementing the first hack I suggest adding the meta in the header, and I apologize for trying to toss in more info than was needed.

The "rel" attribute has been around since HTML 3.2.

It's getting a lot of attention these days because of the "junk" pages that are being indexed by the major search engines. Most notably caused by individuals who comment (spam) a blog, wicki, or forum site. The search engines are looking for a way to conserve resources (use it where it counts) and prevent indexing of sites with no relative content.

So they are asking the community to start using the rel="nofollow" attribute to help them stop-- at the very least slow -- the "spamming".

When an individual spams a site they leave links on the post hoping that the search engines will "follow" the link back to their site. When they (the spammers) do this they are hoping to increase their "popularity" with search engines.

The rel="nofollow" does not prevent the search engines from indexing your pages. Nor, does it prevent the other site from being indexed when search engines do it directly.

It will simply tell the search engine not to follow the link that was posted on your page (thread/post) -- that was NOT created by you.

ABOUT THE HACK
If you are worried about your PAGERANK than use this.

If you want to prevent spammers from posting in your forum than this hack will not help. Spammers will continue doing what they do ... the best route is to remove post and ban user. Most will not even know you are using rel="nofollow" and some will not even understand it.

SOME CONTROLS ARE NEEDED
I think there should be some controls.

For example, converting all posted links with rel="nofollow" also punishes those who are loyal to the site.

Why not help your loyal members with their site "popularity"? Do not convert links posted by loyal users. Allow the search engines to follow these links. Some sites can even list this as a membership benefit. -- just throwing ideas

Anyway, what I'm trying to get to is that the ADMIN should have some control over what links get rel="nofollow".

As it is now, all "in-house" links are tagged with rel="nofollow" which may hurt your "popularity".

Alrighty then, try this:

This will make it so anyone who is an admin (group 6 - change this to whatever you want) will not have their links tagged with the nofollow attribute.

The syntax for multiple groups escapes me at present, but if someone can remind me, I will change it.