Link Manager does not support nofollow in Link Relationship (XFN)

[hakre]

The wordpress link manager (/wp-admin/link-manager.php) with it's edit command (/wp-admin/link.php) does not support the nofollow attribute.

Next to that it is not possible to use other notations for the rel link attribute because the <INPUT name="link_rel> is read only.

[hakre]

As a workaround, it's possible to disable javascript. The rel field then is not read-only any longer and own values can be entered.

Another workaround is to remove the read-only state with a tool like firebug or the various inspect elements features browsers support these days.

[hakre]

Just thinking loudly about addint a no-follow checkbox in there ... .

[westi]

I don't think we need this for now.

[archon810]

westi, I'm not sure why you closed this - the core issue remains - the rel field is not editable and is instead readonly, only modifiable by the pre-selected radio buttons and checkboxes.

Even the ​Links Manager Codex page suggests the rel field is accepting arbitrary values, like nofollow, while in reality it's not:

rel - Specifies the rel attribute that will be put onto the link's a tag when displayed on the screen. Some possible values are nofollow (if you don't want search engines to follow the link), author, and smart. Multiple rel keywords should be separated with spaces.

It is quite common to want to add a nofollow attribute, or other custom rels to links, and Wordpress should allow it (as it says it does in its own documentation).

[wonderboymusic]

Related #21307

[nacin]

20 months later, I'm with westi. XFN is a defined (if old) standard, and nofollow shouldn't conflate that. Also , nofollow kind of defeats the purpose of a blogroll, so it doesn't make sense to add more features when the link manager already has too much bloat. The attribute is doable via the API or a plugin, good enough for me.