Re: Link relation types and validity in <link>, was: ACTION-182 and Issue-27

 >> The definition of "external" is:
 >>
 >> "Indicates that the referenced document is not part of the same site
 >> as the current document."
 >> First of all, this doesn't sound terrible useful. Where does it come
 >> from?
 >> But, assuming it *is* useful, why wouldn't it apply to <link>?
 >
 > Indeed. I have difficulties to connect the use cases.
 > It touches to the can of worms of what is a Web site.
 > A site distributed on multiple domains, a site only on one domain, a 
 > site which is a subset of a domain, etc.

That is exactly why it might be useful: a multiple domain website author 
would thus indicates what are the links to external website. He might 
use it to inform in any way that this is an external website (using CSS 
as told before on this thread), that's a use and we just don't know what 
search engine do with that, they might use it to understand the limit of 
such complicated website or in their ranking system, anyway, event if it 
is not used now in such a way, it might be in the future, so, even if we 
don't know if it is useful now, it still might be in the future.


 >> The definition of "nofollow" is:
 >>
 >> "Indicates that the current document's original author or publisher
 >> does not endorse the referenced document."
 >> Great. Why is this invalid on <link>?
 >> (see also <http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10172>)
 >
 > I think the reasoning is that there is no way that the "link" element
 > has been set by someone who does not own the Web site. Initially
 > "nofollow" had been designed by Movable Type, Technorati and Google
 > folks (I may miss some people) for coping with comments on blogs
 > which are spams aka external user inputs that have not been validated
 > by the owner of the site.

What ever, I think rel="nofollow" should be seen as the equivalent of 
the content="nofollow" in the <meta name="robots"> that's individualized 
by the author what link that should be followed or not.

This also might be useful for internal links for example:
<head>
  <meta name="robots" content="noarchive,index,follow">
</head>
<body>
  <p>I have <a href="deepweb.htm" rel="nofollow">a page in the deep 
web</a> and <a href="webpage.htm>a page in the web</a>.</p>
</body>

Now would search engine respect this? That's another question.

Received on Thursday, 3 April 2014 13:13:05 UTC