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Sep
04
2008
Adding No Follow to Joomla Menu Links
Written by Steve Burge   
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If you don't want pages to indexed by search engines, it's standard SEO practice to add rel="nofollow" on links to that page. Pages you might not want indexed include "Terms and Conditions", "Privacy Policy" and other pages that contains content you don't want to rank for.

However, inside Joomla core, nofollow is not an option for menu links. At the request of some SEO Club members, and with some smart help from Brian Teeman, we've modified the Joomla menu module to allow no-following of links.

How to Use

  1. Upload the new module
  2. Publish this in place of mod_mainmenu
  3. Whenever you want to use no-follow, simply select "On Click, Open in: New Window in Browser Navigation"

Why a New Module and Not a Patch?

Simple - to make it easier to upgrade. With hack attempts rising lately, its important to upgrade as smoothly and easily as possible.

Doesn't the SEF Patch, sh404SEF etc. do this?

No. They add the no-follow to the metadata of the page being linked to. This actually adds no-follow to the menu link itself. Click here for more details on the differences between no follow, meta no follow and robots.txt.

Downloads

 

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Comments  

 
#1 Mike P 2008-09-04 15:32
Hi Steve. I've been looking for a good way to do this for some time. Very excited to try out the new module! :-)
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#2 Joseph LeBlanc 2008-09-04 15:47
This is what I like about Joomla!: scratch your own itch without core modifications.

However, you might want to reword the "Why a New Module and Not a Hack?" section there as you're using the word "hack" in two different senses. Had to think about what you were saying there!
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#3 Brian Teeman 2008-09-04 15:57
Ideally of course it would have been great to achieve this properly and to actualy install a replacement to the menu creator. maybe in J1.6 it will be possible to replace each individual part (i was going to say component but thats confusing :P )in the engine.

For now what I really is the ability to override languages
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#4 Steve Burge 2008-09-04 16:45
Cheers Brian - permissions fixed.

Yep - not being able to change the option to say "no follow" instead of "new window" is a little confusing.
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#5 Robert Wetzlmayr 2008-09-05 00:11
Useful, thanks. That's a nice capability to hide secondary content like TOS pages or imprints from the search engines. A slight correction: The attribute would be spelled rel="nofollow" (without the blank)
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#6 pippo morba 2008-09-05 02:25
Hi, does this module work for Joomfish 2.0RC as well?
anybody tested it?
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#7 Steve Burge 2008-09-05 09:03
Thanks Robert - only two typos in one post? Not bad for me :-)

Hi Pippo - no, but it should work fine. Its just the default menu module slightly modified.
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#8 ILJ 2008-09-05 11:16
Ive been looking for this last time but totally forget it
thanks for this Steve.

Pardon my english understand, does this module auto detect when user right click and open in new windows?.

how do i set some of the menus to add no-follow.
my site now its indexing my mainmenu as site desc. damm..

thanks
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#9 ILJ 2008-09-05 11:19
There is another guide for direct coding.
http://www.vitez-studios.com/development/tutorials/add-nofollow-attribute-to-joomla-menu-items.html :-)
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#10 Steve Burge 2008-09-05 11:20
Hi ILJ

These modules don't open a new window any more. If you chose the "Open in a New Window", it won't any more. It will just add nofollow.
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