rel="nofollow" in this day and age

April 5, 2022 2:05 AM

Should there be an easy way to mark links as rel="nofollow" or otherwise indicate that they are not endorsements?

While making fun of "tacticool" products, my comment looks almost like keyword-stuffing link-spam. I edited it to manually add rel="nofollow" so that (maybe?) search engines wouldn't see it as an endorsement by metafilter. wikipedia says "as of March 1 2020, Google is treating the nofollow link attribute as a hint, rather than a directive, for crawling and indexing purposes". So, my questions are:

A) Does this keyword matter anymore? and if so
2) Should there be an easy way to mark links as non-endorsements?

posted by autopilot to Etiquette/Policy at 2:05 AM (7 comments total)

Hey there, people can talk about this whole topic generally (I didn't know about the "hint" thing! harumph!), but I just wanted to mention that in terms of coding something up, this would pretty far down on frimble's big list of So Very Very Many Things, and also let folks know that they can contact us if they have a situation like this and need help to do a no-follow. IOW, we (mods) can do it for you.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:10 AM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

One option is to take a screen shot of the product page and then link to that (using the image hosting service of your choice). People can see the product and the sales context but no Google juice is generated.
posted by Mitheral at 6:09 AM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sadly, I suspect the days when MetaFilter had the kind of page rank juice that made a significant difference to the things we linked are probably over.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:03 AM on April 5, 2022 [11 favorites]

I like the older, less popular or zeitgeisty MeFi, to be honest. Rather be the quirky little bar with a bunch of cranky old-timers, a snarky bartender, and a few hipster college kids looking for something 'authentic', rather than the hip, trendy joint with a line outside and people recording tiktoks.
posted by signal at 7:40 AM on April 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

You haven’t been able to stop a crawl with nofollow for a long time (I mean, there are so many other ways Google will get to the site.) But they supposedly do still prevent a search rank boost.

Personally I don’t think adding the attr it’s worth the time, but if it helps someone be comfortable sharing something they don’t endorse but that adds to the discussion, I certainly don’t mind.
posted by michaelh at 10:55 AM on April 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Should there be an easy way to mark links as rel="nofollow" or otherwise indicate that they are not endorsements?

You can use the Ironic Detachment tag
< GenX > highspeeddaddy.com < /GenX >
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:05 PM on April 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Signal, me too...
posted by blue shadows at 12:03 AM on April 7, 2022