Not true.
The links just need to have a "no follow" attribute (which is something that Lemmy could add, if they haven't already).
These links do not influence the search engine rankings of the destination URL because Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across them. In fact, Google doesn’t even crawl nofollowed links.
edit: added relevant blob of text.
All the links in this post already have that attribute, so I guess it's already added.
Fantastic! Thank you for looking into the source code and verifying it!
The links just need to have a “no follow” attribute (which is something that Lemmy could add, if they haven’t already).
Sounds like a good suggestion to make on github. I don't know how easy it would be to do that for only reddit links, and I'm not sure how the devs would feel about that.
Also, from your link:
The correlation for the number of “dofollow” backlinks is a little bit weaker than that of the total number of backlinks.
Here’s what Tim said about this:
This could be an indication that Google values some nofollowed links from strong pages more than followed links from weak pages. #whoknows Tim Soulo Tim Soulo, CMO Ahrefs
Take this finding with a large pinch of salt. The primary aim of this study was not to analyze the impact of nofollowed vs. followed links and as such, we didn’t make any effort to isolate this factor.
But even if we assume that nofollowed links have no direct impact on SEO, they can still have an indirect impact because: They help diversify your link profile
Natural backlink profiles are diverse.
There's no guarantee crawlers will actually honor "no follow" though. Google's reached enshittification and is intentionally making search worse, so people spend more time searching and viewing ads. Also no follow is to prevent spammers posting links in online forms and message boards, like posting links on Reddit to an external scam/spam domain. Linking TO a major site like Reddit is less likely to be spam.
any link someone posts to Lemmy should be assumed spam until proven otherwise. Even if it isn't today, the protocol is open and so there are lots of options for spammers to automate everything about generated an account and then posting links. So far Lemmy isn't popular enough that much effort has been put into it, but there is still a lot of spam moderators have to remove. Links to reddit are a good place to obfuscate things - just create a reddit group for your spam, then post stuff there all the time, and link to that - there are extra steps but you save hosting and appear more legitimate to those who don't realize what is going on (until someone removes you of course, but then repeat with a different group)
If you're archiving reddit pages, please use old.reddit.com because it is more (machine) readable and also saves space