I think they will get recrawled quickly (with the same relevance). Brand new pages have high relevance on established domains, so I wouldn't think it would be any different.
I disagree. I think they are incredibly stupid to do this. I have a unmetered 100mb connection and it costs me less then 3k a month. there is no way that webmaster world can burn 100mb full. and 3k is probably a few days of revenue to that forum with that traffic.....
Maybe so, Shawn. However, who's to say if Google or anyone else is going to call this domain established anymore after they were banned from it? If I were Google, Yahoo and MSN and I sent paid employees for years to that forum to help out members and I also sent other employees at company expense to events sponsored by that forum, then that forum webmaster paid me back by banning my business from their pages, I wouldn't spend a bunch of time trying to help that webmaster regain their placement after they slapped my company in the face by this latest move. I would bet you anything that rouge bots are still crawling all over WMW. The only people they stopped were the very companies they needed to continue to grow their forum and the very companies that helped them get started by providing free advertising in the way of search listings have been kicked out and told not to come back. We are all webmasters around here and it's easy to look at this situation from our own point of view. However, the major search engines have a different agenda than we do and it will be interesting to see how they react to someone using their search traffic to build a successful business and then once built telling them to get lost. I can't speak for all search engines, but I can personally say that Google, Yahoo and MSN have had company folks there for a long time helping members of that forum which has helped them grow much faster than they would have without this SE involvement. Why the webmaster would make this decision instead of creating a revenue stream to financial support expenses is beyond me. Having advertisements on a web site doesn't mean you're selling out the the establishment. It just means that you have to make some money to provide the services that your members need and expect.
I agree that's it's all weird in general... but blocking spiders via robots.txt doesn't make it a "banned" domain. This forum blocks a couple things from all spiders, but I'm sure if those restrictions were removed Google would be spidering those pages within the hour. Google also doesn't strike me as the kind of company that would impose an actual ban on a domain because a site removed itself from the index (I think they will treat webmasterworld as any other domain [no special treatment and no worse treatment whenever they lift their robots.txt restrictions]). I doubt Google really cares all that much... There are Google employees at this forum and I doubt they would care if this forum was in the Google index or not.
ok I have now read the whole thread at webmaster world... Tabke in his infinate wisdom said hes had the best sleep in the last 4 days then he has had in years because they are not getting so hammered by bots. FIrst of all.... this is your first clue never to buy there bbs software - http://www.bestbbs.com/ 2nd of all... do they really have such crappy admins they cant make a hidden lnk at the bottom the the page that logs the ip then bans it at the firewall/webserver level for x amount of minutes? SERIOUSLY YOU BLOCK ALL SEARCH ENGINES!!!?!?!? Thats like fricking bordering up all windows in your store because someone got a sunburn... Ahh well... very funny.
well I am really not trying to play Monday morning quarterback cause believe me brother i been there.... I been rooted hacked abused and left hung up wet.... This just seems like such a hrmmm NICE problem to have and so easy to deal with.
Well, if he ever gets so tired of fighting rogue bots and decides he's "over it", I'll give him $250,000 for webmasterworld.com and assimilate it into this forum.
Shawn honestly I know your a classy guy and not one to rag on another but... Being you run a huge forum that gets as much se traffic if not more then wmw arnt you asking your self wtf there admins are doing?
I'm sure they get more traffic, but yeah... as I said earlier in this thread I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out a few months down the road.
I think I need to take some classes in humility from shawnhogan.edu. You are so damn humble lol... btw http://www.alexa.com/data/details/t...bmasterworld.com&y=r&url=digitalpoint.com#top looks like there is a new leader in town... (not starting to be humble quite yet =P )