[whatwg] Proposal: Exclude robots on a per-link basis

[Eric Shtivelberg]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Markus Ernst <derernst at gmx.ch> wrote:

> Trying to find a solution to tell robots not to follow these links, I came
> across microformat Robots Exclusion Profile
> http://microformats.org/wiki/robots-exclusion and the @rel=nofollow
> attribute. While the latter does not look robot-specific to me (it actually
> states that the author wants to discourage from following the link), I must
> admit that I don't fully understand the Robots Exclusion Profile approach.
> If this approach is serving the purpose, please feel free to ignore this
> proposal. It might then be helpful to add some hint on this somewhere in
> 4.12 of the HTML spec.
>

The rel="nofollow" does serve a purpose and it is even supported by all
major search engines, but there's a big "but" - some of them do follow it
but don't use it, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow#Interpretation_by_the_individual_search_engines

So suggesting another attribute or something that not everyone will follow
is useless.

So yeah everyone can ignore it :)

Regards,