Need help deleting rel="nofollow" from internal links

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.

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.

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

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.

jordanjay29

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

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.

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.

Zeokat

Well... finally achieved an "unprofessional" way to do this, but at least i don't have to edit core files and can handle internal links like i need.

I'm using custom bbcodes to handle internal links. In this way i can evade the rel="nofollow" tag. The unique possible issue is that someone guess the custom bbcode and use it to add spam. Not sure if exists any way to add rights to bbcodes and who can use them.

Also note that this is a temporal fix, and when this issue will be fixed i can run a search-and-replace SQL query to delete all custom bbcode.

Maybe this can also help other webmasters searching for a solution.

0E800

Solution? Or are you going to release an extension?

Btw - way to be vigilant in findng a solution.

Aethior

Related issue on github: flarum/core626

jordanjay29

Zeokat I actually think SMF did the same way. [url] would use external linkage behavior and [iurl] would use internal. Not sure if they addressed rel="nofollow" very closely, but other behaviors were modeled that way.

Zeokat

0E800 Well... i'm not planning to release any official extension because it's something "temporal" (until core team decide to solve this).

The extension that i coded to solve it can be located at https://github.com/Zeokat/flarum-ext-folinks and https://packagist.org/packages/zeokat/flarum-ext-folinks . If anyone wants to to use as basecode to release something official, feel free to use it.