internal links with rel="nofollow"?

[Bzdurek]

While working on upgrade of an older SMF forum to 2.0.2 (using Core theme) I have noticed something I don't understand. Under 2.0.2 some internal links (links to the forum itself) have added rel="nofollow". That happens for example on the recent posts page with all thread subjects (which are links to the threads) and while reading the threads (in which case each post title is a link to this particular post and has rel="new_win nofollow" attribute).

I would probably not notice that if not for the fact my browser is configured in such a way all nofollow links are displayed in yellow (sometimes makes SEO work easier).

Now, I would understand if nofollow were added to outgoing links, and I am aware of the mods that can do it to things people post on the forum. But why internal links, with a good anchor text? Is it a bug, or a feature?

At the moment new version of the forum is available only locally, so I can't post a link.

[Oldiesmann]

Simply put, it's for SEO purposes. The URLs from the 'recent topics' page are direct links to posts, which would already be indexed by the search engines when they index the topic that those posts are in.

We already have code in place to tell the search engines not to index things when they're accessed that way, but the extra 'rel="nofollow"' prevents them from even following those URLs to begin with, saving bandwidth and decreasing the number of internal links that the search engine is aware of.

[Bzdurek]

OK, thanks, I see the idea.

[Daniel30]

If i want to change this, so that recent posts would not be nofollow. How would i do this?

[Kindred]

why?

[Daniel30]

I think it would make google crawl the posts faster.

[Arantor]

No, it wouldn't make any difference.

[Daniel30]

Ok, you are probably right, but i would like to try it. So if you could tell me how to do it i would appreciate it.

[Jade Elizabeth]

W3C is telling me "rel="new_win nofollow"" isn't valid because "new_win" isnt a proper keyword for rel....is that true? Why is it there if it's invalid?