[pmwiki-users] "nofollow" links missing on skins

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 08:44:18AM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> I have been logging the activity on a wiki and was surprised to see 
> some of the crawlers trying diff, edit, and print action links. I was 
> under the impression that these had "nofollow" attributes.

FWIW, I should note that many robots completely ignore the 
nofollow attributes on links, including Yahoo! Slurp and msnbot.

It's worth noting that the anti-spam convention that first introduced
"nofollow" doesn't say anything about robots not following the links,
only that links with rel="nofollow" shouldn't be weighted in search
results.

> Unfortunately, it appears to be a custom skin problem . The skin is 
> producing the links, and they are missing the "nofollow" text. The 
> default actions on Site.PageActions have both the nofollow markup and 
> access keys defined.
> 
> I am not sure where to put this, but there should be a warning that 
> by changing the skin, you may lose some of these features.

I'd put notes on the individual skins that don't supply these.
The skin author may be more inclined to correct it in the future.  :-)
Even if there's not a complete note, perhaps just a [[!nofollow]]
category tag in the skin page would be sufficient (and the
Category.Nofollow page could then describe the situation and its
potential impact).

Pm