Currently, links in posts do not have the rel="nofollow" attribute:


Instead, they only have rel="noopener". "nofollow" prevents Google and other search engines from considering the links for their page ranking, while "noopener" prevents the site being linked from modifying the DOM of the site doing the linking.

I was under the impression that links had "nofollow" previously - maybe that was disabled when "noopener" was added?

Adding "nofollow" to the rel attribute would disincentivize spammers from attacking our forum for internet points, as well as improve our standing with Google, which is currently rather lacking.

The attribute should probably be left off for posts within the site itself, in order to maximize our own ranking.

I do think that existing Cemetech users should be able to create links without this attribute since, unlike spammers, links that most active users create are generally useful and deserve traffic. Maybe this could be a perk that enables after a certain number of posts?

It never existed, and we've had a bug open to consider it for a while:


Doing anything beyond adding attributes on every link is too difficult with our current ancient phpbb, and I think there's little practical impact on our ranking because actual spam links never live very long (probably not long enough to be crawled at all).

rel="ugc" seems more appropriate anyway (as a later note on the above-pictured bug observes).