Need help deleting rel="nofollow" from internal links

Zeokat

I was playing with Flarum for some time and finally i decided to migrate my community to this software and use in production, but exists one thing i need that couldn't achieve bymyself.

I need to delete rel="nofollow" ONLY from internal links. I need it badly because is a must for SEO. I can't migrate until i have this feature enabled because i will lose tons of "link juice".

If someone can tell me how to achive this will be welcomed. Also if someone offer me a paid extension to cover this, maybe i can accept it depending on the price.

I tryed to play with vendor/flarum/core/src/Formatter/Formatter.php but no luck at all:

    /**
     * @param Configurator $configurator
     */
    protected function configureExternalLinks(Configurator $configurator)
    {
        $dom = $configurator->tags['URL']->template->asDOM();

        foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $a) {
            $a->setAttribute('target', '_blank');
            $a->setAttribute('rel', 'nofollow');
        }

        $dom->saveChanges();
    }

0E800

Zeokat
Couldn't you just do something like this?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/529345/best-way-to-do-a-find-replace-in-several-files

Search for your string in all files and remove the string?

Zeokat

0E800 I think that you didn't get what i need. I don't need delete anything from core files, i need to handle properly internal links.

For example, if i add here an internal link like https://discuss.flarum.org/d/5661-need-help-deleting-rel-nofollow-from-internal-links it contains rel=nofollow attribute wich not pass "link juice". Internal links shouldn't contain rel=nofollow and another advice from Google for usability is that they shouldn't contain target="_blank".

For now should be enougth that internal links don't have rel=nofollow to mantain a proper link juice flow. It's not my own idea about how internal links should work, it's a general SEO idea present in most of forum systems (MyBB, phpBB, NodeBB, etc...).

Flarum's internal link structure simply redirect all your link juice to user profiles, something useless in most of situations. That's why i need this basic SEO stuff done before migration but i couldn't achieve this.

@JoshyPHP Any advice about how to achieve this? I think we can cover this issue handling s9e\TextFormatter but i have no idea...

JoshyPHP

It's not the first time that discussion pops up: JoshyPHP

First step is to remove the nofollow attribute from the template. Then you can either add an attribute to URL tags that's set at parsing time in a tag filter and use it in the template to determine whether to add nofollow. The attribute could be a basic true/false thing, or a value for rel or maybe the URL's domain name. XSLT has some basic string functions that can be used but no regexp support.

Maybe the attribute could be set at rendering time in PHP using the replaceAttributes method. It's all a trade-off between features and complexity.

Zeokat

JoshyPHP I'm trying to figure how to achieve this but honestly... everything sounds too complex for me.

At this point i'm not sure if will be better try to learn how to achieve this or... simply change my plan and jump to NodeBB.

Thanks for the info JoshyPHP ?

JoshyPHP

That's because the concept of an "internal" link is complicated. It would be relatively easy to toggle nofollow from all links via an extension.

jordanjay29

JoshyPHP Is it possible that Flarum views all posted linked as external, and all generated (by Flarum itself as part of the software) links as internal?

Zeokat

Internal links are all related to your domain, for example here all links pointing to discuss.flarum.org should be considered as internal.

Manage completely this kind of links will need an extension, because you maybe want to add subdomains also as internal links. That is another history but... at least links pointing to the domain where the forum is installed must be considered as internal to not break the link juice flow.

Zeokat

jordanjay29 Yes, that is exactly how Flarum works. Every link posted is viewed as external, wich is an error.

Internal and external links concept (from SEO point of view) is related to the domain.

JoshyPHP

jordanjay29 In practical terms, every link generated by markup (or autolinked) has rel="nofollow". In hindsight, maybe it would be a better idea not to do that by default and configure the behaviour via an extension. It would be easier to configure and extend. For now, the extension could simply add rel="nofollow" to all links (which would allow the admins to disable it entirely) and then if somebody really cares about it, create a user interface and add more features. Obviously the limiting factor is development time.

jordanjay29

Zeokat In that case, you absolutely need an extension to achieve what you're looking for.

Zeokat

jordanjay29 Yes, i'm exploring code of flarum-ext-mentions and flarum-ext-github-autolink to try to figure how to achieve this but everything seems out of my knowledge haha ?

JoshyPHP

If all you're looking for is a temporary fix you can always remove the part that says $dom->saveChanges(); in the code you quoted above then enable/disable an extension to force the cache to be cleared, and none of the links will have nofollow.

Zeokat

JoshyPHP Yeah, i already thougth on doing that but... in that way i will have a bigger problem, known as spammy links. Parsing every link without nofollow will send my community to a deep hole on SERPs.

Google write the rules, no more chances than follow them if you care about organic traffic.

UaMV

Not an ideal solution, but I used the this selector in CSS to identify external links. You could use a similar selector in jquery to identify internal links and strip the nofollow attribute from matching tags.

Zeokat

UaMV That solution don't guarante that Google handle properly the rel attribute. Extracted from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34153334/will-google-see-rel-nofollow-if-it-is-added-by-jquery

Zeokat

Well i'm trying to build a simple extension to achieve this... so the first step will be delete nofollow from the links.

I have this code but my problem is that removeAttributedon't works while setAttributeis working properly.

     /**
     * @param ConfigureFormatter $event
     */
    public function configure(ConfigureFormatter $event)
    {
        $configurator = $event->configurator;
        
        $dom = $configurator->tags['URL']->template->asDOM();
        foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $a) {
            $a->removeAttribute('target');
            $a->removeAttribute('rel');
            $a->setAttribute('testing', 'temp');
        }

Not sure if i'm doing something in thw wrong way... or if i'm missing something. Can anyone help me?

In my brain something tells me that the atributes can't be removed because maybe they didn't already added... mmm...

Zeokat

I answer myself... was exactly what i was thinking... if i modify vendor/flarum/core/src/Formatter/Formatter.php to fire the event after configureExternalLinks, the attributes are removed:

    /**
     * @return Configurator
     */
    protected function getConfigurator()
    {
        $configurator = new Configurator;

        $configurator->rootRules->enableAutoLineBreaks();

        $configurator->rendering->engine = 'PHP';
        $configurator->rendering->engine->cacheDir = $this->cacheDir;

        $configurator->Escaper;
        $configurator->Autoemail;
        $configurator->Autolink;
        $configurator->tags->onDuplicate('replace');

        $this->configureExternalLinks($configurator);

        $this->events->fire(new ConfigureFormatter($configurator));

        return $configurator;
    }

JoshyPHP

Your extension may be executed before Flarum adds the attributes. There's a way to specify the order/priority of a listener but I don't know it off the top of my head. Check out Laravel's API, it should be in there.

Zeokat

Played full day with this sh*t with 0 results... frustrating ?

Time to change course.