Google comment spam

[Ex Forum Admin]

This could effect a few people : 

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

People who post their links in forums etc with hopes of boosting their own page rank on the search engines will be effected. Google has identified a need to block these links from getting credit in the search engines and has setup a tag that their engine will use to ignore such links...

James

 

[Richard-R]

Fall of chair laughing, Google block url's on forums......... and than you go and post the Living France URL on your post.

[Ianhaycox]

So are you going to add the nofollow attribute on these forums ?

[Dick Smith]

Richard and Ian - I think that James means that Google will no longer count URLs in posts towards the links to a site which it counts in order to assess the popularity of sites, not that there will be any blocking. Just that they won't count in the popularity stakes. AFAIK you can still follow links, for example the one at the end of James' post, because it has no connection to Google at all. So he wasn't being stupid, and it won't apply to LivingFrance forums unless they decide to break the links with their own software.

[Hegs]

James, It is important to mention this initiative is supported by more than just Google, Yahoo!, MSN also.

Yahoo!'s take on this is here: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

This is in the webmaster's interests as well; aside from messing up the forum, or guestbook with junk links, some decisions are made by search engines on the basis of links. For example, if lots of links on your page are to porn sites, a search engine may well think you are porn.

[Ex Forum Admin]

That's interesting, thanks for that.

This current software obviously doesn't have the rel no follow attribute but versions that come out in the future may well have? It is an interesting concept but if there is a generic nofollow tag for all links within a forum (if it is built-in within the forum software), some other forums who need to promote other sites on purpose will be affected, a choice would be the best option but harder to implement.

So if this is taken up, which may or may not be the case, the reasoning in the future for posting your url will be as a link only and not also as a way of improving your position within search engines.

James

Oh and the main reason for me now posting the LF url is for people to see the main site (which I think many people miss out on as they bookmark the forum) with the hope that more people will buy/subscribe to the magazine.