Hi @dpaule ,
thank you for your very interesting question and sorry for the little delay in answering!
The SEO purpose of pointing terms to cornerstone contents it’s to increase the number of internal links that really matters. A good internal link building that have also an appropriate user experience will increase the possibility that your reader will stick on your website in order to deepen your content reading the definition of a term that is a genuine “Cornerstone content”.
The “no follow” option is useful when you want to give a great user experience, using tooltips and all the other stuff, to your readers but you don’t want to make some terms relevant in your SEO strategy, so you just set this option for a specific term and you still can use all the features of the plugin without affecting your linking strategy.
I think it’s very easy to understand why you want to have a page full of keywords and links that points to relevant pages (if your terms are related to your website content they are good keywords for sure). A good way to achieve this goal without forcing keywords into contents is to have a “Glossary archive page”. ??
We give options like “Tooltip only” just because sometimes people wants to tweak the usage of our plugin in order to get advantage just from the auto-link engine so we provide some settings like this one just for more flexibility but here there is no SEO purpose at all. ??
I hope this will clarify your doubts and if doesn’t, please, keep asking good question like this one to me! ??
