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by solardev 534 days ago
Do you do any moderation at all? Usually some combination of Cloudflare + Akismet + manual review (or LLMs these days) can drastically cut down on spam. Much more expensive than just adding HTML attributes, of course.

And unmoderated share links should probably be noindex and nofollow anyway, no? Why would you want search engines to crawl that?
2 comments
hyperknot 534 days ago
I'm thinking of launching a new app where a single click share would be a feature worth implementing, but definitely not part of the core functionality. I'm trying to figure out if this feature is worth implementing at all, or it's just asking for trouble.
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solardev 534 days ago
I always appreciate shareable permalinks (if that's what you mean), but I think that's a different question than SEO.

Personally I would expect share links to be unlisted (not indexed by search engines, not publicly discoverable, with a long enough uuid to be effectively unguessable). "Publish publicly" could be a separate function you add later, with moderation?

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PaulHoule 534 days ago
Personally I don't think "nofollow" and "noindex" are effective the way many webmasters think. I think they're a scam that Matt Butts came up to gaslight webmasters, right up there with all the other Matt Butts schemes to gaslight webmasters.

You're right though that you have to moderate the stuff. It's typical backwards Google Economy thinking that have to block spam to please Google (that's how an SEO spammer thinks, it's the only thing they think) as opposed to block spam so that your users will keep coming back. Letting your web site get spammed is like fertilizing your flowers with herbicide.

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solardev 534 days ago
I don't know who Matt Butts is, but what do you mean? Those are just standard tools, along with robots.txt and a siremap, for telling well-behaved crawlers what to index and not. I've used them effectively across many sites. They won't help with rude crawlers (LLM training etc.) that ignore those signals, but should work with all major search engines. What am I missing?

But yeah, I think spam should be deleted altogether, not merely hidden from search engines.

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