Testing an anti-spam thingie
If I add an external link to a site we should mark it for the search engines as "no follow" so there is no advantage to spamming us that way....
It's true that Google recommends this.
However, the people who are paid to create the spam get paid whether their links are followed or not. They neither know nor care.
Spam posts still get indexed by the search engines, even when the links within are marked nofollow. So any search for key phrases found in the spam posts will still take customers via 7 Cups to the websites the spammers are promoting.
Plenty of the spam we see here contains URLs in the title, or BBCode (the ones with the square brackets). These do not get linkified at all on 7 Cups, but the spammers keep posting them for the same reasons.
It remains a mystery why 7 Cups allows new members to post URLs or links at all. It's perfectly easy to prevent. (Although preventing it would damage 7 Cups' own search engine rankings.)
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn I was looking for something else and just stumbled across this - and it's been a while since I had to code things at uni, so no idea whether this is doable - but just an idea: if I remember correctly, iframes are sufficiently separate for them not to be indexed. I know that users can't do html codes (cause I tried to, actually for hyperlinks/formatting). Is it possible to have the hyperlink feature directly include an iframe for the entire content of the message? Then, obviously, the entire post would be blocked for search engines and and searching for any included phrase would not work. There are ways to fool nofollow tags, but I don't remember them.
But, it's been 6 years, coding is something I'm not particularly good at - not sure whether it's doable or would even work.
Although an iframe might not always be indexed as part of the parent page, it could be depending on the search engine's algorithm. Its src attribute (the URL) can certainly be seen by search engines and followed. The iframe tag does not support nofollow. So I'm confused by this suggestion.
By the way, users can include some HTML codes but not others. There's some kind of filter, but we are not told exactly what it allows. The one I use most often is blockquote:
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions
(Hamlet, Act IV Scene V)
@cahovi
@RarelyCharlie
I know href doesn't work - interesting,,, but not the right place to start testing, however tempting.
It's ages ago that I studied this, and it was an exam I almost failed. I haven't coded ever since, but am trying to get back in after exams - which is in like a week. It's just random stuff I remember which might be complete nonsense. I think that you can can block iframes somehow. I mean, naturally, regular iframes are searchable content, but combining them with a robots.txt blocks search engine access to parts of a website. While iframes can't directly include the nofollow tag, I think robots.txt can. Basically " User-agent: * Disallow: /" should block most (all?) bots?
Just thinking aloud. I'm not a good coder, and busy with a really big exam next week - and this is tempting me to research and procrastinate. I was pretty sure that I missed something obvious, like iframe not working with nofollow - but if you include a robots.txt?