I noticed recently when making a post about fixing htpaccess files with Drupal that the URL I was using in my tutorial example "example.com", was automatically being turned into a real indexable link! This was very concerning from an SEO perspective because I do not want to endorse example.com by linking to it from my site. For all I know the site doesn't even exist and it might contain illicit content or be in what some people refer to as "bad neighborhood" on the web that I don't want to be associated with by search engines.

In many ways you can't really control who links to you, and I don't think search engines will ever hold incoming links against a site... that is unless those links all originate over seas, come online rapidly, and feature valuable (and similar) link text that resembles a paid linking campaign (search engines hate that), so it's not harmful to have a bad incoming link but it is potentially harmful to have a bad outgoing one. That is why the new "nofollow" technique has become so popular on blog comments. It tells search engines "hey, I didn't put this link here and I don't endorse the site" it's a way of allowing humans to see what's there but reminding Google that you aren't endorsing it.

By the way, for anyone who doesn't know, the nofollow code is just a short line that says rel="nofollow" inside of an a tag for a link. So it would look like this <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">

Okay, back to the real point of this tutorial! I had found that Drupal was automatically linking my URL's when I was writing content for my site here. This was immenseley frustrating and I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how stop Drupal from autolinking URL's in posts. I finally found the trick as follows, just go to: Administer > Site Configuration > Input Formats > Configure (for either Full HTML or Filtered HTML) and then scroll down to URL Filter. This setting is checked by default (probably for convenience sake) but can be very harmful for SEO if you are using example URL's as I was.

Another great tip here for you Drupal users is that it is worth enabling the Full HTML if you want to do a little bit of coding in your posts (such as manually adding links or images). As soon as you turn off the URL Filter nothing will be linked unless you do it yourself. This is one reason that I use the FCKeditor Module in my copy of Drupal, it allows me to easily add links and images, especially now that Drupal isn't doing it for me ;)