I noticed that the Tapestry website uses nofollow on all the external links. Perhaps there is a reason for this, but I wanted to point out a few thoughts about how it might be less than optimal from the standpoint of spreading information about Tapestry.
When nofollow was first introduced the search engine optimization benefit that wasn't passed to nofollow links was available for other links. So if you put nofollow on all external links it helped you push more SEO value to your internal pages links that didn't use nofollow. This meant that adding nofollow to external links could help your internal pages rank better. This is no longer the case. The seo value that would normally be assigned to external links is simply lost when they are marked as nofollow. So there is no advantage to http://tapestry.apache.org in marking each external link with no follow. However, there is a significant advantage to the Tapestry community by making Tapestry related resources easier to find in search engines. For example, if you do a search for: Tapestry 5 IDE I'd expect to find at least the following pages in the first pages results: 1. Tapestry's pages and wiki articles talking about IDE integration and setup. 2. Jet Brain's page about their Tapestry integration 3. The loom plugin 2 and 3 don't show up in the search results unless you dig down a few pages into the results. It is much more likely they would show up on the first page if the links on http://tapestry.apache.org/community.html were not marked with nofollow. Another example is what you get when you just search for the word Tapestry. The top result is http://tapestry.apache.org. This is good, but if you look down the page, you'll see that all the other results are all about fabric. This isn't too unexpected.but here is basically how Google is thinking. Google recognizes that Apache Tapestry is the most important website for someone looking for the word Tapestry. Then it looks to see what websites Apache Tapestry considers important. All it finds is a bunch of links that Apache Tapestry has flagged as "don't trust these, they might be spam". Anyway, there is some food for thought. There may be some reasons that it needs to be this way, but I wanted to make sure we aren't just doing something out of habit because it was beneficial 5 years ago when it might be detrimental today. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
