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If you allow new users to create user profiles with links, and those user profiles are visible to Google, spammers will create a bunch of new user accounts and
by dfabulich 6y ago
If you allow new users to create user profiles with links, and those user profiles are visible to Google, spammers will create a bunch of new user accounts and fill them with spam links.
The easiest way to prevent this is to block Google from seeing user profiles by requiring login to see the profiles.
- chrisweekly 6y ago> "and those user profiles are visible to Google" googlebot adheres to robots.txt, right? in which case couldn't self-hosted gitlab admins add a robots.txt entry for the profile page url?
- jefftk 6y agoThat requires the spammers to notice that it's blocked in robots.txt, which seems optimistic
- dspillett 6y agoMost bots aren't going to bother checking if you've done that, so while they'll not get the expected benefit you'll still get the spam.
- pitay 6y agoThere is also adding the rel="nofollow ugc" to user submitted links that removes the benefits of linking for spammers. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569