rel=nofollow in Movable Type

nevetS

Jan 27th 2005, 5:09 pm

I think MT did a good thing in making the rel=nofollow attribute a plugin instead of a part of their core code - at least for now.

Sites that receive a lot of blogspam either from linkbacks or comments can certainly use this - and it makes it useful.

But thinking about the other side of the street - people who participate in your community should get some benefit from participating. If there isn't a problem with your user community putting up links to bad sites left and right, it should be OK if you miss the occasional link that should be deleted.

Just My Opinion.

I just fear that if everybody puts up "rel=nofollow" all over the place then we're going to get to the point that it ends up being a useless tag. If it is used responsibly, then it can dramatically cut down on spam.

david_sakh

Jan 27th 2005, 5:31 pm

well said. Sometimes me indecisiveness to post is just pushed over the edge by the thought, well, I'll get to express my opinion, and get a tiny backlink while I'm at it.

nevetS

Jan 28th 2005, 12:33 am

I wonder - is this valid HTML? if you implement this thing, does it mean that you have to be running XHTML? It's not like they (W3) would go back and update all existing standards to deal with this.

I searched w3.org and got this:
Your search - rel=nofollow - did not match any documents.

Bernard

Jan 28th 2005, 4:28 am

rel is a standard attribute for HTML links:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-rel

nofollow is a new value for the attribute. This is in accordance with the standard which allows for new values to be defined.

rel="nofollow" should validate.

Eadz

Jan 28th 2005, 4:29 am

I wonder - is this valid HTML? if you implement this thing, does it mean that you have to be running XHTML?

You can impliment it using valid XHTML yes. You can make your own rel=anything and it can be valid, providing you follow the rest of the xhtml standards.

nevetS

Jan 28th 2005, 5:08 am

Interesting... It looks like it is valid HTML 4.0 with a bit of a caveat (at least as I understand it from reading. I didn't read the whole thing... too much for my brain for now, but it looks like you have to put a reference to your metadata profile if you use a non-standard link tag. Something like:
<HEAD profile="http://www.acme.com/profiles/core"> I haven't seen anything from google about them publishing a profile. It could be that it is valid XHTML. I put a link on an xhtml page and it validated fine. I don't have any 4.0 spec pages to validate. I also noticed that there is a draft spec for this here: http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/RelNoFollow (this link I found on google's blog).

i'm not the only one who has a problem (http://weblogs.asp.net/dareobasanjo/archive/2005/01/19/356177.aspx) with this apparently.

I followed the w3 link and clicked on "link-types" right after "rel ="

Here is the relevant information, which I had to get from a few different pages:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-rel
rel = link-types (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links) [CI] (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#case-insensitive)This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-href) attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#profiles) to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-profile) attribute of the HEAD (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#edef-HEAD) element for more details.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#profiles
The profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-profile) attribute of the HEAD (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#edef-HEAD) specifies the location of a meta data profile. The value of the profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-profile) attribute is a URI. User agents may use this URI in two ways:

As a globally unique name. User agents may be able to recognize the name (without actually retrieving the profile) and perform some activity based on known conventions for that profile. For instance, search engines could provide an interface for searching through catalogs of HTML documents, where these documents all use the same profile for representing catalog entries.
As a link. User agents may dereference the URI and perform some activity based on the actual definitions within the profile (e.g., authorize the usage of the profile within the current HTML document). This specification does not define formats for profiles.
This example refers to a hypothetical profile that defines useful properties for document indexing. The properties defined by this profile -- including "author", "copyright", "keywords", and "date" -- have their values set by subsequent META (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#edef-META) declarations.

<HEAD profile="http://www.acme.com/profiles/core">
<TITLE>How to complete Memorandum cover sheets
<META name="author" content="John Doe">
<META name="copyright" content="© 1997 Acme Corp.">
<META name="keywords" content="corporate,guidelines,cataloging">
<META name="date" content="1994-11-06T08:49:37+00:00">
</HEAD>

As this specification is being written, it is common practice to use the date formats described in [RFC2616] (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#ref-RFC2616), section 3.3. As these formats are relatively hard to process, we recommend that authors use the [ISO8601] (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#ref-ISO8601) date format. For more information, see the sections on the INS (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#edef-ins) and DEL (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#edef-del) elements.

The scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme) attribute allows authors to provide user agents more context for the correct interpretation of meta data. At times, such additional information may be critical, as when meta data may be specified in different formats. For example, an author might specify a date in the (ambiguous) format "10-9-97"; does this mean 9 October 1997 or 10 September 1997? The scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme) attribute value "Month-Day-Year" would disambiguate this date value.

At other times, the scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme) attribute may provide helpful but non-critical information to user agents.

For example, the following scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme) declaration may help a user agent determine that the value of the "identifier" property is an ISBN code number:

<META scheme="ISBN" name="identifier" content="0-8230-2355-9">

Values for the scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-scheme) attribute depend on the property name and the associated profile (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-profile).

Note. One sample profile is the Dublin Core (see [DCORE] (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#ref-DUBLIN-CORE)). This profile defines a set of recommended properties for electronic bibliographic descriptions, and is intended to promote interoperability among disparate description models.