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

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 26 Nov 2011, Markus Ernst wrote:
> 
> Viewing the logs of applications I wrote, I noticed that a considerable 
> number of requests are from robots following links of types such as "Add 
> to shopping cart" or "Remember this item" - links that typically point 
> to the same page they are clicked on, with some GET variable that 
> triggers an action on the server.

That's mis-use of GET. The right solution is to not use a link.

Because of this, I haven't added a new feature for this request.


On Sat, 26 Nov 2011, Eric Shtivelberg wrote:
> 
> 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

Technically rel=nofollow doesn't mean that robots shouldn't follow the 
link, it means that authority shouldn't flow through the link in systems 
that attempt to rank pages (e.g. search engines).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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