Add rel=nofollow to robots.txt-blocked links on crawlable pages#103
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The /u/ path is disallowed in robots.txt. Without nofollow, Google treats the link as a discovery signal it can't follow, then reports the page as "Blocked by robots.txt" or "Not found" in Search Console. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Feedback button (anonymous fallback for non-editors), the "What links here" backlinks dropdown item, and the creator/admin/editor badges all link to URLs disallowed in robots.txt (/c/*/feedback/, /c/*/backlinks/, /activity/<user>/). Without nofollow, Google discovers them as crawl candidates it can't follow, then flags the parent page in Search Console. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Fixes
Fixes: #83 (the "Blocked by robots.txt" / "Not found" rows)
Summary
Google Search Console flags pages whose only inbound links are robots.txt-disallowed without
rel=\"nofollow\". Audited the templates rendered to anonymous crawlers (root,/c/<path>/, 404) and found seven<a>tags that hit Disallow patterns withoutnofollow:assets/templates/cotton/header.html— Sign in (/u/login/)assets/templates/404.html— "Sign In to Find Out" (/u/login/)pages/templates/pages/detail.html— Feedback button (/c/*/feedback/), "What links here" (/c/*/backlinks/), creator/admins/editors badges (/activity/<user>/)All of these are action/activity URLs we don't want indexed regardless, so adding
nofollowis the right fix (vs. removing the Disallow rules).The directory-detail action links are all gated by
{% if user.is_authenticated %}/{% if can_edit %}, so crawlers don't see them — no edit needed there.Adjacent (not in this PR)
wiki/lib/markdown.py:594-597deliberately skips action URLs in the user-content nofollow pass, on the assumption that robots.txt is enough. That's the same assumption Google is now pushing back on. Worth a follow-up if a user writes a markdown link like[edit me](/c/foo/edit/)in page content.Deployment
This PR should:
skip-deploy(skips everything below)skip-web-deployskip-daemon-deployTemplate-only change; no code paths or migrations.
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