http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2387976 I outed someone in this thread. Anyone who has a clue about SEO knows the claims he's made are ridiculous and 100% false. Because of what I said he proceeded to ruin my sales threads. I don't care about that at all. But IMO we don't want members like this on DP. If they are prepared to be misleading to profit from newbies, you have to question their ethics. Can threads like this be reported?
There is a difference between logic and proof. If we are actually talking proof... yes, it probably would be quite difficult to prove without access to search engine algorithms. I highly doubt search engines are spidering URLs that are not "clickable", but I wouldn't put it past them. They are quite good at finding content these days (parsing JavaScript as well as making AJAX calls). Google even has guidelines on how to design AJAX-based apps to make them spiderable. http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html Do I personally think they spider links outside of "a" tags? Yes, in some cases. Do I think they spider links that are just in a giant blob of text? No, probably not. Am I going to waste my time setting up a lab environment to prove it either way? No. On top of it, what you prove today, may not even be the case tomorrow since search engine algorithms and how they work are not static and change daily. Personally, I think *all* paid links are pointless and misleading... but that's just me (and an entirely different topic).
Dcristo - fwiw i agree the item he's offering is pretty worthless. That said, theres a difference between removing outright scams and illegal activity vs taking out those deemed a ridiculous waste of funds. Thats for users to decide. Ftr - even if they wanted to allow mods to remove threads based on their personal assessment of its worthiness, youd need another entire set of mods dedicated solely to the task. That said, it seems better to let the market decide than the mods.
Also, to be fair... the thread itself doesn't seem like he's trying to scam anyone. He clearly states in the thread that links will not be clickable, etc, etc... While it doesn't have much value to someone looking to buy links, it could have some (tiny) value to someone just looking for traffic. {shrug} Either way, he seems relatively up front about what it is and is not he's selling. And while I personally think it's worthless, someone might find some value in it somehow. And for the record, I personally think anyone selling even "clickable" links are selling something barely more than worthless (the value I would see in it is from the traffic, not the link itself). But that's just me...
You're right, threads don't automatically receive the PR of the root domain, new threads have 0 pagerank, even the user profile. Now whether the search engines crawl the links in signatures on that particular forum, I have no idea.