All url's entered into posts have the nofollow tag appended. I see why, but...

I have a niche web and mostly all url's entered into discussion will be on-topic, not general ones. I am firm believer of the SEO theory that says that outcoming links to on-topic sites actually improve your ranking in search engines. (I know there are many people who believe otherwise.) That's the reason why I would like to turn off the nofollow attribute.

Being very low on programming myself, but hey I can edit php fiels that's no problem :), I have only found that the following two files need a change:

bb_codes.php
bb_func_txt.php

Is that true or do I need to change more files for having the url's without nofollow?

Thanks, Tom

outcoming links to on-topic sites actually improve your ranking in search engines - outcoming links make sense ONLY if sites have reciprocal links to your project. Else they are nothing, in SEO point of view. You think, you may put 1,000,000 links to other sites and be #1 in the SE? :-)

Anyway, bb_codes.php and bb_func_txt.php are the right files to edit/remove this tag. Look up for "nofollow" and you'll find code strings you need to edit. No another files are necessary to edit.

... as with many things in SEO, there are two schools of thought...

I don't want thousands of outcoming links, just few, as I am building my site to become the "authority hub" for that particular topic, and for that it makes sense to link to other sites that rank above me. (Moreover, the sites above me are mostly universities, and I have no chance to get a reciprocal link from them. And I am one of those who does almost no or very little reciprocals.) Btw. I will not link with keywords that I target in anchor, but I will usually put just the other site's name in anchor. That's somewhere along the lines you followed when you changed the anchor of minibb from "minibb" to "minibb forum software" (at least that I understood from some post on this forum).

The SEO theory is that I will be loosing on pagerank, that would otherwise distribute to my other pages, but pagerank is not "the king", when I search, often lower pagerank pages rank higher than high PR pages for particular keyword searches.

I know this theory might be wrong, but there is only few things in SEO that are "confirmed" and stable when it comes to the future evolution.

Thanks for the advice!

In file bb_codes.php line # 47, what would be the correct expression after removing the "nofollow" attribute. Will there be a ? after target=\"(_new|_blank)\"

I mean:

target=\"(_new|_blank)\"?> or target=\"(_new|_blank)\">

I can't post the entire expression as I believe HTML tags are not allowed.

$pattern[]="/<a href=\"(.+?)\" target=\"(_new|_blank)\">(.+?)<\/a>/i";

Okay, Im going to sound like a noob but what do you remove from each file? I have a pretty similar idea to the author and want people to post their website in my miniBB forum.

You need to remove rel="nofollow" what else? ;-)

that's all?! I thought it'll be more than that. Thanks