Some sites, such as phpBB.com, have forums that remove one's external links. DigitalPoint does not do this. Is there any reason why a site would do this other than to prevent sites from having free promotion? This seems extremely stingy in the least!
You can get penalised by the search engines if you link to bad neighbourhoods, the favourite at thte moment is to spam forums. Some just stop this happening, while others do not seem to care. It is down to personal preference
I mis-spoke when I said that phpBB removes links. It was really this site... http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15132 The page says that one can do this just by editting the robots.txt file.
highrankings forums and others hide links from google to hoard page rank thye use a form of cloaking , when the bot visits they give it a different version of the site then a person
IMR is in the process of considering whether to disallow sig linking or not, for the same reasons stated above
Is anybody aware of any forums that allow sig links in the posts, but actually blocks them from the SE's? If this is true, it would be sneaky to say the least. This would be really true for the pros that basically make their forums by responding to and helping others. Any forums you know of?
highrankings is one. it was mentioned here and I checked it out. the sigs show, but if you view the cached page instead of the live one, they disappear completely
Most surfer type forums for the average Web user, not webmaster, would not provide backlinks. No need. But, forums that have savvy webmasters and SEO pros that are members of the forum there to learn and teach on how to move up in the SERPs and gain backlinks will sure as hell want to be given credit in the SE's for their sig links. I, for one, would not participate in the forum if the links were promised, but sneakily disallowed.
The only 3 Reasons that a site might not want search engines to see external links are... 1. You charge a premium for your advertising and don't want to give your posters a "Free Ride". 2. You are afraid of PageRank Leakage. In otherwords a site feels that each of its links reduces the sites PageRanking. 3. Preventing external links minimizes the amount of "SPAM" messages user posts (Because the posters get a lot less out of them). Each of these reasons is wrong, a myth or easily preventable. Any guess as to which one reason is which?
Pornographic spamming on bulletin board with young, as in kid, viewers. First I disallowed spidering with robots.txt. Then as temporary measure made index non-viewable as I planned to password protect directory. Found spammer getting in anyway. Before password protecting thought I would try to hide directory structure to see if that would keep him out. Succeeded in hiding and now I can't view to work on forum. I truly do not know what I have done or how to undo. Have had query into host since Sunday for help with problem. Still no response. It is not major issue to anyone but me. I do not like to be had by a sleeze ball. Shannon
SPAM is always going to occur no matter what. The only resolution is to delete the offenders and notify such places as SpamCop.com.
Smyrl I agree with you totally. No pre-screened url should be allowed to be posted on normal chat forums. It should be a hard and fast rule for teen based forums. But, for a specialty forums such as Digital Point, SEO Chat and SEO Guy, where the only ones attending the forums are webmasters and SEO folks working hard to get BL's, their reward for providing 90-95% of the knowledge transfer should be the backlinks from their posts.
Well, personally I that's an excuse for conversing PageRank. Does anyone actually have an example of a forum that was penalized (I've certainly never heard of one)? Also, Google News and Google Group articles use live links. And since Google applies it's algorithms to itself, they also have the chance of getting penalized if that was the case. Sounds more like a link popularity conservation cop-out to me.
It's just mostly warez sites that use it, if they hotlink to micros0ft site, and microsoft will see that they get like 1000 hits in from a warez domain/site they will know something not good is going on... Thatz why