Suggest adding rel="nofollow" to links used by citation plugin

[jnugent]

Describe the bug
The citation style language plugin depends upon a list of citation formats with full links containing information to generate the citation format, e.g.

....../citationstylelanguage/get/associacao-brasileira-de-normas-tecnicas?submissionId=21727&publicationId=29453

And these links can be crawled by search engines and can end up being found in results, looking like:

Suggest adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the anchor tag used in the article_details.tpl template to prevent these from being indexed.

https://github.com/pkp/ojs/blob/stable-3_3_0/templates/frontend/objects/article_details.tpl#L350

Google seems to really like to crawl these:

What application are you using?
OJS 3.3 and 3.4

[kaitlinnewson]

PRs for review

• 3.3 @asmecher : pkp/pkp-lib#10474 add nofollow to citationstylelanguage links ojs#4449
• 3.4: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 add nofollow to citationstylelanguage links citationStyleLanguage#130
• main: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 add nofollow to citationstylelanguage links citationStyleLanguage#131

Some other discussion of this issue can be found in pkp/ojs#2465. I went with the "nofollow" solution as an alternative to changes to robots.txt, and am assuming we won't be making major changes to the citations in 3.3.

If approved, I'll forward-port to the citationStyleLanguage plugin for 3.4/main, as this part of the template has been moved.

This can also be added in any theme for 3.3 that is overriding this template.

[asmecher]

Thanks, @kaitlinnewson, that makes sense. Please go ahead and port and merge forward! I've merged the stable-3_3_0 PR.

[kaitlinnewson]

Forward-ported and merged!

@asmecher Are submodule updates also needed for 3.4/main, or will that be done closer to the next releases?

[jnugent]

Hi @kaitlinnewson the PKP PS team appreciates having the submodule updates in stable-3_4 as they are needed because we track the stable branches for our hosted installations, rather than working off of release packages. We routinely update installs by just pulling down recent commits and updating sub modules as necessary.

[kaitlinnewson]

Submodule update PRs -

3.4:

• OJS: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin ojs#4454
• OMP: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin omp#1712
• OPS: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin ops#781

main:

• OJS: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin ojs#4455
• OMP: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin omp#1713
• OPS: pkp/pkp-lib#10474 submodule update for csl plugin ops#782

@bozana Are you able to merge the 3.4 submodule PRs? This is already done for 3.3 as the change was in the core theme then and not in the CSL plugin.

[bozana]

Hi @kaitlinnewson, I merged OJS and OPS, waiting for OMP tests, when all pass successfully I will merge it too.
Main branch does not necessarily need to be updated -- lots of changes currently happening there... but because it is citationStyleLanguage submodule it will not disturb the others so I can merge them too when tests pass...

[bozana]

All merged... :-)

[kaitlinnewson]

Thanks @bozana! Closing this as completed.