There is a setting in Admin panel: add rel nofollow to user content: Add rel nofollow to all submitted user content, except for internal links (including parent domains). If you change this, you must rebake all posts with: “rake posts:rebake”
This setting is by default checked but all the links of parent domain is putting up with nofollow attribute.
Please use following steps to replicate:
1 Go to admin panel and search for setting “add rel nofollow to user content”, just to make sure it is checked
Speaking for Sitepoint, I could see use out of it with our article integration. Having sitepoint articles followed by default would make a lot of sense and in our case it would be community.sitepoint.com matching www.sitepoint.com
I would think other article integrated sites would see value in it too.
Also there was bug when domain like foo.com is added in exclude_rel_nofollow_domains setting, then domain like nofoo.com was also being allowed to be excluded from nofollow. Fixed that too.
Known domain name suffix of site should be used, e.g.
example.com example.co.uk example.website
With the rule being “any domain name with a dot plus this suffix is followed”
If necessary add another site setting to hold this value. If the value is not present, the nofollow will simply not be as accurate, e.g. it will nofollow stuff that it technically should not. It errs on the side of caution.
That’s much preferable to a giant library dependency…
Worst case, default to the discourse domain, that way, once added, it only no-follows internal links; ie: community.sitepoint.com, and we’d have to make it more generic by changing it to sitepoint.com