Block robots from ticket (comment) edit history

[anonymous]

To reduce server load caused by crawlers.
To disarm spam links in ticket comment history (that is, if spam comments have not been properly deleted).

Add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link to the ticket description edit history. (The page it points to has <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> already.)

Add a rel="nofollow" attributes to the links to ticket comment edit history.

Add <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> to ticket comment edit history pages.

AFAIK, there are crawlers that won't access nofollow-links if there are no other references. The semantics however just says to not add weight to such links in ranking, which is also desired here.

[Jun Omae]

It seems that it makes sense.

The <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> line is declared at source:/tags/trac-1.6/trac/templates/diff_view.html@:27​. The template is used in trac/ticket/web_ui.py:

$ git grep -n 'diff_view\.html' trac-1.6 -- '*.py'
trac-1.6:trac/ticket/web_ui.py:1047:        return 'diff_view.html', data
trac-1.6:trac/ticket/web_ui.py:1181:        return 'diff_view.html', data

trac/ticket/templates/ticket_box.html

@@ -163 +163 @@
         # if description_change:
         <a href="${href.ticket(ticket.id, action='diff',
                  version=description_change.cnum)}"
+           rel="nofollow"
            class="lastmod trac-diff"
            title="${description_change.date}">
           # trans author = authorinfo(description_change.author)

trac/ticket/templates/ticket_change.html

@@ -242 +242 @@
   #   endif
   #   if comment_version is greaterthan(0):
   (<a href="${href.ticket(ticket.id, action='comment-diff', cnum=cnum,
-                          version=comment_version)}">${
-    _("diff")}</a>)
+                          version=comment_version)}"
+      rel="nofollow">${_("diff")}</a>)
   #   endif
 </div>
 #   endif

However, crawlers can follow the diff links in <link rel="prev" /> and <link rel="next" />.

[Jun Omae]

Workaround is to add the following lines to your robots.txt:

Disallow: /ticket/*?action=*
Disallow: /ticket/*?cnum_hist=*
Disallow: /ticket/*?cversion=*
Disallow: /ticket/*?replyto=*
Disallow: /ticket/*?version=*