Prevent keywords to become hyperlink

Support
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Can I prevent certain words to become hyperlink? e.g users often type certain keywords e.g Abc.Net that becomes broken hyperlinks. which is harmful for seo considering there are many such broken links.

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You can remove/edit the TLD ext links in your admin settings. Have a search in there for “markdown linkify tlds”.

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I don’t pretend to know about SEO, but unless the user is tl3 then the links should be marked nofollow. So shouldn’t they be ignored as far as SEO is concerned? (but I think I saw somewhere that nofollow was more of a suggestion than a rule).

If they always use the same one (e.g., xyz.net, which I have never seen anyone use before in places that I have seen) you might be able to use watched words to replace them.

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Broken links don’t affect SEO anyway. And nofollow is just a suggestion and search bots follow it or not. And if there is nofollow or not, it has nothing to do with backlinkvalue either.

So, broken links bother only users.

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If it’s a particular user who just wants more control over what they’re unintentionally auto-linking, they can add something like <hairsp> to break up the extension.

Eg.

abc.N<hairsp>et

abc.Net

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And an easier version of that is just to wrap with backticks or use the </> tool in the composer like xyz.net. Maybe it’s just a user education issue

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Just? Sure it is an education issue. But it is really big UX and UI issue too. Such tricks than breaked html-tag are

  • not logical (unless one is coder or similar)
  • must remember one (useless) detail more
  • different than anywhere else

And then is wondered why there is difficulties to get people in Discourse-based forums and why markdown is not that widely loved than here quite often so many thinks :wink:

In Discourse is already too high demand to know HTML to write an ordinary forum post, and if Ordinary Joe/Jane must learn how to break html-tags it is just too much (I don’t know if that trick has anything to do with html-tags but if it looks/smells/tastes like tag in bad UX it will be a zebra :wink: )

There is no easy AND good solutions, I reckon. The closest to good would be a black list. There is still big chance that someone will use something like mywebsite.com and get a functional link — but it is matter of high Ts and staff. And there we can educate — but it can’t be counted as final or even good solution.

An ordinary user has learned that URLs doesn’t work all the time — Facebook teached it :wink: That’s why so many knows the most common trick: mywebsite .com.