I’m happy to announce a small SEO feature roll-out that will help boost your community SEO. Strong SEO is at the core of Jatra and it reflects in every new feature that we launch.

Importance of Internal and External Links in SEO

Links are the core building blocks of the Internet. These links indicate users (and Google as well) which external pages are relevant to the content.

It’s important to manage internal links (links within the domain) as well as external links (to other domain). But when most of the content on community is user-generated (UGC), it’s almost impossible to manage ‘follow’ and ‘nofollow’ links.

Follow links: These are the links with rel=”follow” attribute and it’s the default attribute. It tells search engines that they can follow these links and also pass on the link-juice to the linked page.

Nofollow links: These are the links with rel=”nofollow” attribute. Website administrators need to specify the links as “nofollow” if they don’t want search engines to follow the links.

But why should you care?

It’s basically to save search engines from wasting their bandwidth from crawling low-value pages. Google admires this and is considered as a ranking factor.

Jatra’s Approach to Follow and NoFollow Links

Jatra automates the creation of follow and nofollow links through this following algorithm:

• If the link is internal (points to the existing domain), it’s always a follow link

• If the link is created or edited by Admins / Owners of Jatra community, it’s always a follow link

• Any external link created by regular user is always a no-follow link

This approach helps you maintain a clean link structure throughout your site, helps Google find relevant pages on your domain and also avoids unnecessary linking to low-value pages on external domains.

If you have questions, post them below. I’ll be happy to answer them for you.