Enforce rel='nofollow' and target='_blank' for all links

Hi,

One reason why spammers hit blogs comments and forums is to increase the number of links to their 'resources' so that search engines pick this up and increase the spammers rankings.
A number of search engine providers have adopted the practice of not indexing content addressed by links with the rel='nofollow' attribute. This gives blog and forum owners a weapon to stop this practice; make sure all links added by users are given the rel='nofollow' attribute automatically, so search engine spiders stop at the blog/forum page and go no further.

So, ideally, if any user adds a link to my forum, FCKeditor would automatically add the rel='nofollow' attribute.

It would also be nice if target='_blank' could be added in the same way.

No doubt, if I knew the FCKeditor source well, it would be quite straightforward to add this functionality. But I don't, so before I start crawling the depths of this wonderful but complex codebase, I was wondering if any other users had come across a similar requirement and found a way to do this?

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Thanks...

Fri, 08/17/2007 - 22:11

alfonsoml

Joined: 31/12/2006

Posts: 3735

Re: Enforce rel='nofollow' and target='_blank' for all links

If I'm not mistaken the option to default target="_blank" on new links will be available in 2.5, but I doubt very much that any spammer is bothering to typing their messages in your form and instead they are using automated tools.

If you want to protect against them you MUST sanitize the received data on the server, you can't trust that anything will be done on the client side. Not only because they could add links to their sites, but because they could inject javascript and try to do any XSS attack on your site. So not trusting the data is a must, you have to clean up the data that is received on the server, and while you are at it then you modify all the links to include those attributes that you want.

Of course, don't write the cleaning code by yourself, search for something already done and that you can configure.

Fri, 08/17/2007 - 22:30

holf

Joined: 17/08/2007

Posts: 3

Re: Enforce rel='nofollow' and target='_blank' for all links

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/ ... -spam.html

Fri, 08/17/2007 - 23:42

alfonsoml

Joined: 31/12/2006

Posts: 3735

Re: Enforce rel='nofollow' and target='_blank' for all links

If you want to do it that way, then edit the fcklink.html dialog (or more properly it's javascript file), look in the Ok() function and add it there, but I still think that it will be much easier at server side: detect a link and add the attributes there using some simple regexp on input data.

Sat, 08/18/2007 - 00:17

holf

Joined: 17/08/2007

Posts: 3