SEO improvement: updated link rel attribute

I get the idea behind the value. In our community we especially encourage our super users to add links to internal and external (company) pages when they reply to questions or post their tutorials and hardware reviews. Our goal by that is to strengthen target content and landing pages. If I understand correctly, this change will have a negative effect on our strategy, right?

Hello @bjoern_schulze, we already had a nofollow before on the link which prevented google from following the links. This will give google some extra metadata but I don't think your strategy was already working.

I can see plus and minus sides to this change, but I ultimately feel that it’s a good move. It may be useful to allow Super Users and/or specific roles to override this as it’s an anti-abuse mechanism, but I’d still say that it should be enabled by default and only allows an override if an Administrator/Community Manager explicitly flips the switch. The other override that might be handy relates to trusted domains. I might post these as an Idea later actually, but I think one of them already exists on the board. I’ll double check.

In terms of OVO, it seems most of the spammers have either recently been scared away by me being too good at flagging literally everything or the spam filter is hammering pretty much all of it straight into the bin as I’ve not seen much recently. But yeah, given how dodgy some of the spam links were (and especially some of the websites they go to!), I think it makes sense to set these flags by default. You really don’t want Google to be associating your domains with some of the spammy junk I’ve flagged up in the past!

@Marion Frecaut If I understand your reply to bjorn correctly, links in topics are offering no SEO value to external sites unless placed by an admin from the backend? The nofollow was doing this before, but now ugc helps depricate it as well? 

We have a similar strategy in place as bjorn’s community and didn’t realize that our CTA for people to share their content on our site wouldn’t give them any SEO value. 

Hello @DannyPancratz  we follow this as a SEO best practice and recommendation for forum software and indeed we had the nofollow already which caused search engines to avoid giving higher rank to the links. Though previously we applied this to no follow all links and now we only apply this ugc to the links made by registered users and superuser. 

In summary, the links look like this:

Example of a link posted by a moderator role or higher:

• <a href="https://nos.pt/foobar" rel="noopener">...</a>

Example of a link posted by a regular user:

• <a href="https://nos.pt/foobar" rel="ugc nofollow noopener">...</a>