No Follow Links

In order to stay in the good graces of Google, you need to have a no follow on links that go to other sites that you may get any type of payment from. This would apply to affiliate links like Xara has for its products.

I do web sites with independent sales representatives and if there is a link to one of the sites that they represent, it would need to be a no follow link. Google can penalize the site that is doing the linking and the site it is linking to. Google started this in order to get rid of these link sharing sites and the paid back line schemes that were around for older SEO.

With using Xara software there is currently no way to enter a no follow link. It would be helpful if there was a radio button on the Web properties window which you could select that would put the no follow code in:

Typical code would be:
<a href=”insert URL here” rel=”nofollow”

Currently a person would have to manually go into the HTML code and place the no follow.

I have seen that over the last couple of years there has been a couple of questions on this and there was never a solution.

Typical requirement for no follow links :

paid links
press releases
advertorials
affiliate links including sales representative use of equipment brochures on manufactures sites.
and native advertising
Review of products that was gifted as part of the review

Several large companies have institutes a requirement that they only allow no follow links to their site in order to not get afoul of Googles policy.

Ray

Ray, you could put something like $("a[href*='http']:not([href*='"+location.hostname+"'])").attr('rel','nofollow'); into the site placeholder but Google will not find (see) any URLs with "nofollow" in the source so you will still be penalised.

So not much help,
Acorn

Acorn,

Like you pointed out, that will disable all of the links for do follow.

We need the ability to only disable specific links. With multi page web sites, it becomes very burdensome to try and modify the site's HTML code. This seems to be an easy fix by just adding a radio style button that would add this into the code. Xara may say that this is very entailed change but I do not think so.

Ray

Never had need to use "nofollow" but I recall on a recent thread someone had typed the text "theater" in the Open Link drop-down box (never knew you could do this) to link to a placeholder named theater and load various video files into that placeholder named "theater".

I've just tried doing the same typing in "nofollow" and it appears to correctly append the target="nofollow" to the <a href> tag

Quote:

---

<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk" target="nofollow" onclick="return(xr_nn());">
<span class="xr_ar" onmousemove="xr_mo(this,0,event)" style="left:163px;top:92px;width:247px;height:40px ; background-color: #007F01;"></span>
</a>

---

Hope this helps.

Egg,

I tried what you suggested and it seems to work. The only questions I have is target="nofollow" the same as rel="nofollow" from google point of view for crawling a site? I will have to do some more research on this, maybe someone knows the answer off the top of their head?

Thanks
Ray

Egg, it is not the same.

Acorn

In my research, what Acorn is saying is correct.

Target= is used to tell the system how to open the link, i.e.. same frame or new window.

Rel= is used to tell the system the the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

This information came from the w3schools.com website, which I use for programing questions.

So it looks like we are back to Xara needing to make a change to the program. I wished someone from Xara would reply to see if there is some other way to do this.

Ray

Quote:

---

Egg, it is not the same.

---

Yes, I understand that now, thanks Acorn.

It also appears that target is being dropped in the future so perhaps Xara will need to update the link window soon too? :

The <link> target attribute is not supported in HTML5.

Ray, text links with rel="nofollow" seem to work fine but I can't get a button to do the same.

<p>
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk">BBC</a>
</p>

Egg,

Where are you entering this code at?

When I first discovered this problem, I tried entering the code rel="no folow" under the Web properties box for the email address and nothing worked. Xara could not handle this.

Ray

Try the attached Ray.

Egg,

That is a work around that could be used. However, with this method of using a place holder, it does not lend itself to having a link in a block of text.

I still would like Xara to see if they could address this. It does seem that it should be easy to implement, especially when you see how they have implemented the target= function.

Thanks for your ideas on this.

Ray

Totally agree Ray, just a workaround at present.

Attached is an example of the link embedded in a block of text. Not ideal I know ;)

An example of workaround for a button would be to place the link address to the image alt text and a # to the link address as well as a name htlmclass=no*follow to the button. Then add this code to the page body

Code:

---

<script>
var n=document.getElementsByClassName("no*follow");
for (var i=0;i<n.length;i++){
  var t=n[i],p=t.parentNode;
  if (t.tagName=="IMG"){
    if (p.tagName=="A"){
      if (p.getAttribute("href")=="#"){
          p.rel="nofollow";
          p.href=t.alt;
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>

---

Before the code is execued a link to itself is seen without the rel="nofollow" attribute and after the code is executed the rel="nofollow" attribute is set and the link address is changed to the alt attribute of the image.

Would attach an example file if I could.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by siran

An example of workaround for a button would be to place the link address to the image alt text and a # to the link address as well as a name htlmclass=no*follow to the button. Then add this code to the page body

Code:

---

<script>
var n=document.getElementsByClassName("no*follow");
for (var i=0;i<n.length;i++){
  var t=n[i],p=t.parentNode;
  if (t.tagName=="IMG"){
    if (p.tagName=="A"){
      if (p.getAttribute("href")=="#"){
          p.rel="nofollow";
          p.href=t.alt;
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>

---

Before the code is execued a link to itself is seen without the rel="nofollow" attribute and after the code is executed the rel="nofollow" attribute is set and the link address is changed to the alt attribute of the image.

Would attach an example file if I could.

---

siran, the problem is Google trawling the page skips the JavaScript and sees all the links without nofollow.
I don't think Google uses headerless browsers and then examining the loaded DOM.

Acorn

Acorn, one way or the other. Google should never be able to follow the link.
Before the script is executed the link is to #
After the script is executed the link has a rel="nofollow" attribute.
Maybe an example explains what I am talking about (and I can attach from this computer) :).
If you export to file you will see <a href="#" onclick="return(xr_nn());"> in it.
This will be modified to <a href="http://google.com/" onclick="return(xr_nn());" rel="nofollow"> by the script.
None of these should allow google to follow the link.
My first attempt was to dynamically create an <a> element, simulate a click and immediately remove it (which also worked), but this method seemed to be more straight forward to me.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by siran

Acorn, one way or the other. Google should never be able to follow the link.
Before the script is executed the link is to #
After the script is executed the link has a rel="nofollow" attribute.
Maybe an example explains what I am talking about (and I can attach from this computer) :).
If you export to file you will see <a href="#" onclick="return(xr_nn());"> in it.
This will be modified to <a href="http://google.com/" onclick="return(xr_nn());" rel="nofollow"> by the script.
None of these should allow google to follow the link.
My first attempt was to dynamically create an <a> element, simulate a click and immediately remove it (which also worked), but this method seemed to be more straight forward to me.

---

siran, I get it!

I was playing with a link like javascript:void(jQuery.param.querystring('http://duckduckgo.com', 'rel="no follow"')); but unsuccessfully.

Acorn

I wanted to bring this back up that we could really use a "no follow link" option to the software. I still believe this would be very easy for Xara to add to the software. This is something I have found that can be easily done in other software, Xara should not be limited to only follow link options.

Google still frowns on certain follow links if they are not "no follow"

Ray