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15 years 2 months ago #8242 by widyolar
Google reading JFBC links and reporting 404 errors on my Google Webmaster Tools account. For example Google reports this link as a 404,
tangobeat.com/component/jfbconnect/?task=logout&return=L2ZyYW5jZS9wYXJpcy10YW5nby9taWxvbmdhL21pbG9uZ2EtbGliZXJ0YWQuaHRtbA%3D%3D

Getting errors through JFBC may not seem important because it does not affect operations directly. However, ignoring Google Webmaster Tools 404 errors causes huge drops in traffic. I learned the hard way by restructuring a big site. My site has almost two thousand active pages, so having to deal with thousands of these errors is a very big deal.

My simple brain says that a "rel="nofollow" statement is all that is required in JFBC to fix this. But there is probably more to it. Anyway, it is important. Could you have a look into this?

Thank you,
Keith
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15 years 2 months ago #8247 by alzander
Replied by alzander on topic Needs rel='nofollow"
There is more to it, unfortunately. We just had another mention of this in another post. It's not a simple rel=nofollow because that link isn't actually on the page in a <a href.. it's defined in a Javascript variable, which Google is then reading and assuming it's a link... it is, they're correct, but it shouldn't be doing what it's doing (in our opinion). There's not really a way to add a nofollow to it with the way we've declared it, but we're looking into solutions.

If you want to see where this is occuring in your HTML, just search for "var jfbcLogoutLink" and you'll see the link there. We will likely encode this in the future, but it's annoying that we have to, and will make debugging things a little more difficult, which is never fun.
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15 years 2 months ago #8249 by widyolar
Replied by widyolar on topic Needs rel='nofollow"
Thanks for your attention on this. It is of great importance for anyone actively managing their SEO.

I've been restructuring a menu with about 1,500 items on it and I've become a Google slave. Google never forgets and even when a link is now working, they tell you about stuff they found not working 2 years ago. So it's much better to not let things like this get into their index at all, especially given the possibility of Google putting links from thousands of pages into their directory that I will need to (301 redirect) by hand in the future.

I understand that the solution may make debugging more difficult for you, but this is an significant issue for a large site. If JFBC wasn't such a great value to my site, I would turn it off because of this. Given how important JFBC is, I'll just have to live with the SEO penalty and redirect all the errors by hand too.

Thank you,
Keith
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15 years 2 months ago #8268 by alzander
Replied by alzander on topic Needs rel='nofollow"
We definitely agree its something to fix. Thanks for pointing it out.. I've marked this as a task for us, and we'll do what we can in the next release.
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