On 4/10/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Things like this make nofollow more attractive all the time. Has
there ever been any discussion on perhaps allowing a white-list for
non-spam sites that we won't no-follow? This would be useful for
wikis who don't want to kill all their externals with no-follow.
Or at least a second blacklist for sites that can be linked to but will
have rel="nofollow" applied.
Also, shouldn't we enable nofollow for talk pages? For example, if this
discussion had been on a talk page, those example links above would now
be indexed by search engines and thus help the spammers.
I'm not sure how to implement black or whitelisting for nofollow... :(
Right now we do our URL blacklist at page submission, thats not a
fast path so we can do computationally expensive things like apply a
long list of regexes... to black or whitelist URLs for nofollow we'd
need to perform it at page load, which might not be acceptable. The
only alternatives I can see involve complex changes. For example, we
could extend our external link syntax so that you must explicitly tag
links in order to prevent them from being no-followed, and the black
or whitelist would control which links are allowed to be tagged.
Can a developer please comment on the idea of applying a external
links filter at page load time?
Nofollow per namespace would actually be really good. If we had
per-namespace nofollow right now I'd enable it everywhere except the
main namespace ... you can argue that the main ns links are reviewed
and are of some quality, but that doesn't extend to anywhere else.