1425760 - Use rel="nofollow", not rel="nofollow, noindex", for links

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P1)

Description

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

What did you do?
================
Search for "nofollow, noindex" [1]

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=nofollow%2C+noindex&type

What happened?
==============
This finds several instances of <a rel="nofollow, noindex" ..>.

What should have happened?
==========================
The rel property value should be a list of space-separated values, not comma-separated values. "noindex" is not a standard property either [2], so this should be:

   <a rel="nofollow" ...>

This will suggest that search engines should not follow that link [3]

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types
[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
"nofollow, noindex" is a valid value for the robots meta-tag [4][5], and should not be changed.

   <meta name="robots" content="nofollow, noindex">

[4] http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
[5] https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag#handling-combined-indexing-and-serving-directives

This was first reported as a follow-on comment to another bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420354#c1

Comment 1

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/75bea81ef1489c251b61ca297a464275ff09f0db
bug 1425760: Use rel="nofollow" for links

Use rel="nofollow" for links that we don't want scrapers to follow,
instead of rel="nofollow, noindex", which is not a valid value for the
space-separated rel attribute, but instead for <meta name="robots">.

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/b9f0ef3b4af3a26812f4cc3edf1bfd2476b2c9ec
Merge pull request #4619 from jwhitlock/rel-nofollow-1425760

bug 1425760: Use rel="nofollow" for links

Comment 2

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

Change pushed to stage and production