Add rel=nofollow links to external sites?

[pdehaan]

@zachleat Not sure if this is something we want to consider.
Not that I imagine people are submitting random sites to the leaderboard just to get a referral link bump.

Possibly:

<a href="..." rel="ugc nofollow" >

Via https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/qualify-outbound-links

rel values	NOTES
rel="ugc"	We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, with the ugc value. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.
rel="nofollow"	Use the nofollow value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site. For links within your own site, use the robots.txt disallow rule.

[zachleat]

Ah hmm, do you mean from the author pages? https://www.11ty.dev/authors/zachleat/

We do include rel="sponsored" for the opencollective facepiles:

Are there any downsides to giving referral bumps for folks listing their sites?

[pdehaan]

Yeah, I think I was thinking more about the sites themselves:

$$("div.sites-data-container > a[href^='http']").forEach(link => {
  console.log(`${link.textContent} => ${link.getAttribute("href")}`);
});

/** OUTPUT
11ty.dev => https://www.11ty.dev/
Filament Group => https://www.filamentgroup.com/
fontspeed => https://www.fontspeed.io/
NEJS CONF 2018 => https://2018.nejsconf.com/
NEJS CONF 2019 => https://2019.nejsconf.com/
NEJS CONF History => https://nejsconf.com/
Netlify => https://www.netlify.com/
Zach Leatherman => https://www.zachleat.com/
*/

(Plus possibly all the other 11 sites under DEMOS, EXAMPLES, AND COMMUNITY LINKS)

Probably not a big downside/risk to having a bunch of external links, but curious if Google penalizes you for pages with dozens of outbound links.