I have a question for the SEO gurus out there. I have this social bookmarking site, which until recently was reletively unknown with only about 100 or so visitors a day. Now word has gotten out and I've been seeing more and more traffic (which is good). It's brought in both the good (people who promote great blogs/posts) and the bad (people that promote autoblogs, affiliate links, and other assorted trash). So my issue is this: A few people have begun to create multiple accounts and promote their own sites to the front page. While I don't completely mind this, I do have a problem when somebody creates 9 accounts to promote their site advertising London escorts. Unfortunately I can't police the site 24/7 and so a few less-than-reputable sites have hit the front page in the past. I delete them as soon as I see them, but sometimes they can be up there for upwards of 5-6 hours before I happen to find them. How bad is this for my site? Will I be penalized because a few bad links are on the main page for a couple of hours?
If your site has a lot of out links I don't think that just a couple of bad links was too bad... And ideally in a social network the users itself will penalize this bad links and will go to the last places...
Yes, ideally. However, when the user in question is voting their own story to the front page in a matter of a few minutes, then the other users can't react fast enough.
I agree that the dillution factor may protect your website. The search engines might take into consideration how long these 'bad links' remain on your website too. To further protect yourself you might want to add certain filter words for the urls & titles. By doing that you may at least be able to get rid of the escorts guy. You should maintain a banned urls list too. If you make it too difficult for them to spam you, they will find an easier target.
Spam is bad for all sites. But that is the nature of the beast, every peon with a PC thinks they can game the system for profit. And now you are the victim. This happens to any site that has/allows interactivity and has no real way to monitor or filter the spam effectively. What can you do? That's a good question. Depends on the software you are using. If you can isolate the IP's of the people who are spamming you can block them, but many spammers hit through proxy. It's helpful though.
I have a few ideas on how to deal with the spammers, but it would result in less freedom for all new members (which I don't want). So... if a few bad links won't hurt me, then I'll just leave it the way it is. If however these link WILL hurt me, then I'll have to resort to these drastic measures to deal with the spammers.
What you can do is to penalize any such person who you seem to be spamming your site. You may delete his/her account and ban his/her ID for future. If you monitor this regularly you can reduce spam and its possible that that spammer may not again come to your site as he know its tedious to make a new account everytime. You must give strict guidelines for user before submitting their links or stories.
I'm not asking how to stop spammers, that question has been done to death, and I do have a few ways. What I'm asking here is, how bad is it for my site if I end up linking to other bad sites, even only for a couple of hours? Say the link is only up for an hour or two, will Google penalize my site for that? Will they associate me with these casino/escort sites?
Any website has the ability to come back from the depths of "SEO hell", some may take a LOT longer than others. If you have links on your site pointing to other bad sites for just a few hours no I don't think Google will penalize you for that. The fact is that the content on your main page is constantly changing, this holds true for any website, a news site, social bookmarking, a search engine. A website is a website. Will it penalize you a little bit? It may, but I don't think that's what you should be worried about right now, what you should be worried about is marketing your site and creating buzz so that problems like this fix themselves with the users on your site.