Links Added To Threads by Trusted Discourse Forum Members are NOT Nofollow

Links Added To Threads by Trusted Discourse Forum Members are NOT Nofollow

Update: Made an error below, the Discourse software has a feature where links posted by trusted forum members are NOT nofollow. My mistake was seeing links to discourse.org lacking nofollow which were posted by a trusted forum member (pure coincidence) and jumping to the wrong conclusion it was another blackhat SEO link building technique.

I was wrong, everything within the “More Blackhat SEO Techniques Used by Discourse Forum Software” section below is wrong.

More Blackhat SEO Techniques Used by Discourse Forum Software

It gets better, as I was writing this blackhat SEO tutorial I noticed when viewing source of the Googlecache of Discourse forum posts links to discourse.org are NOT rel=”nofollow”!

Like most forum software scripts, Discourse adds a rel=”nofollow” tag to links added by forum users, this is to stop forum spammers from benefiting SEO wise from the links: Google ignores links with the nofollow tag and passes no SEO benefit.

It would appear Discourse have added an exception for links to their own sites!!!

WOW, now technically not blackhat SEO per se, but you have to admit it’s very shady and not particularly ethical especially when taking into account the 1.7 million indexed cloaked backlinks.

Thanks to PFG (via a comment) for clarifying why some links lacked rel=”nofollow” tags. I’ve kept the section because even though I was wrong it’s a possible blackhat SEO technique to look out for: if I were into blackhat SEO techniques I could use it with the WordPress SEO themes and SEO plugins I release.

Continue Reading Black Hat SEO Link Building Techniques to Avoid - Discourse.org Hidden Links