Thanks, those are good points. We're limited in that we use a shared instance of Confluence; those NOFOLLOW attributes are part of Confluence and even if that's configurable, I don't know that we can turn it off.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Mark <[email protected]> wrote: > 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] > > -- Howard M. Lewis Ship Creator of Apache Tapestry The source for Tapestry training, mentoring and support. Contact me to learn how I can get you up and productive in Tapestry fast! (971) 678-5210 http://howardlewisship.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
