Hi guys, I just open a new discourse community…of course we wanna be index on Google and it’s friends, but we’re gonna open a category that we don’t want to show with any search bot. So the simple question is How to add “nofollow” to an entire category?
Cheers.
Change the permissions to require being logged in.
Not so bad. But what if I just want to hide it from the search bots?
Links already have nofollow added to them. If staff users want to post nofollow links, you can make an <a> tag instead of the other methods of making links.
Oh. I totally missed the question. I thought he wanted the category not to be indexed.
Right. All links have nofollow for TL2 and below.
Right. I just want an entire category and all its posts not to be indexed. I don’t care about the links. I’m talking about the post.
Ah. I don’t think there is a facility to add noindex to posts in a category, and you certainly couldn’t add it to parts of the topic list without tanking the ranking of your entire site.
You’d have to write a plug-in that adds the meta directive to the crawler layout, I don’t think there’s much hope for adding it with JavaScript.
If you want the posts to be publicly available, but denied in robots.txt, you need a plugin. I sort of wrote one. If you’ve got a budget or I find the time, I’ll make it available.
Two problems with that: Noindex breaks if you deny the page in robots.txt (can’t load the page to see the noindex), and that would make the list extremely large.
He wants the posts in the category not to be indexed, so denying the category is, I think, what he means.
Exactly. The things is that I’m trying to connect WP with Discourse with the plugin and manage the comments of my blog posts with Discourse. But I don’t want Google indexing the entry on Discourse because it would be a duplicate of the Wordpress entry, thinking on SEO of course. So I think the proper way to do this is creating a Category, like ‘Feedback’, on Discourse and adding a nofollow by default to all entries on it.
Oh. That. See Is it possible for the feverbee blog posts to be pulled in full? - Forum Support - FeverBee Experts .
I see. I’m not an SEO person. I think that adding the no follow for the category to robots.txt will do what you want.
I think the effectiveness depends on whether or not any links get exposed
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
… the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
I think your best options are to either put those posts in a non-public category (no “everyone” permissions) or to not worry about which one Google chooses to return in the results.