Question NoFollow attribute being used on internal links to Forum Categories and Topics

I have my forum up and running for over 2 months and have a number of posts. I really like kunena and 5.0 adds a lot of nice features.

Today I did a search on Google for some of the forum posts and found none. After further investigation I found that kunena nofollow all forum links it creates to forum categories and form topics.

To say the least I was shocked to find this. Why is this being done? Why would anyone want to nofollow internal links on their website? I understand external links posted by users but not internal ones generated by the site for navigation. If Google is not allowed to visit pages to discover content then how will it index it?

This also happens with the Kunena Latest Forum Posts module.

This is a VERY URGENT issue that needs to be fixed. After searching I see that this issue has been brought up before but nothing has been done about it.

If Google cannot discover the forum content then it will not be indexed...

we have that nofollow because else you get duplicated url, google will give you penalties then. But not all link are nofollow. so google can crawl the topics itself. Are you using any sef component? maybe you need to turn off the kunena plugin for that.

You can see it here: www.google.com/search?q=0+-+Method+setLe...ed+site%3Akunena.org

Else google can't find us also

ok found the issue, will fix it for the next release.

Okay thanks.

Which links should I expect to not be nofollow?

I assume the Category links on the forum index page along with the topic links in each category?

on the next version, there is only follow on the category item list.

Now the topics are crawled by the rss, but if you turned rss off, then its never crawled.

I have turned off RSS. RSS is pretty broken in Joomla for articles, etc.. in a lot of cases with shortcodes not being run and a few other things. Also RSS feeds are not as popular as they use to be. Sitemaps is what people use to tell search engines where to find things.
Why nofollow the topics on the Category pags? Are not these the same links that would be in the RSS feeds?

NoFollow also really shouldn't be used this way. If some other website links to the forum topic using the incorrect link and doesn't include a nofollow then Google will find the page anyways. From Wikipedia:
"nofollow is a value ... to instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index."
On Google's help page there is no mention of using nofollow to combat duplicate content: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

If people are worried about duplicate content then Google recommends using canonical urls
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Basically this includes a html element to the proper page. Here is a quote from Wikipedia:
"A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page[1][2] as part of search engine optimization. It is described in RFC 6596, which went live in April 2012."

if you use canonical, then the page isn't indexed, so the same issue.
But on the next version we have some improvements like meta robots on the topic itself. based on your joomla global setting.

But you don't want the page indexed with a different url because of duplicate content issues. The canonical page will be the only indexed page.
For example the page:
www.kunena.org/forum/k5-0-support/138179...es-and-topics/unread
canonical url would be:
www.kunena.org/forum/k5-0-support/138179...ategories-and-topics
A forum creates interesting issues regarding duplicate content etc.. since there are so many ways of displaying the content.

unread are only visible by logged in users, not for bots. But for the next version we have some improvements. Please wait for the next release