4 ms·

It's not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it's necessary to clean the spammy links up.

It's not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it's necessary to clean the spammy links up. The main thing I'd recommend for a site owner who gets a fairly large number of link removal requests is to ask "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close. But if the links actually look organic to you or you're confident that your site is high-quality or doesn't have those sorts of loopholes, you can safely ignore these requests unless you're feeling helpful.

buro9 12y ago
> For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close. It isn't, and never has been. We operate a nursery period ( https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html ) in which the actions of new members are both severely restricted and observed by existing members, and all initial content must be 100% public and observable by members (no private messages, no user profile customisations). We very aggressively remove content and ban anyone who creates any content that appears spammy and continue to encourage reports of spam even long after they have been registered. We report those individuals to http://www.stopforumspam.com/ http://www.stopforumspam.com/ at the same time preventing signups from anyone that SFS reports as coming from an IP recently used to spam. Comments are run through the Akismet API and moderated if they are flagged as spam. When a spammer is caught (a few times a year someone does get past all of this - for a very brief moment), then every piece of content of theirs, and any other content from nearby IPs is reviewed and usually removed. We made profile pages non-public, we even removed the customised profile fields from display (though we do leave them in the form as it helps us spot any scripts that are trying to spam us and we autoban them). To put it mildly, we are aggressive. We've made a really poor experience for new members of our community to help ensure the quality of the content on the site and that we're free from spam. We felt that was worth it from day one, we still feel that it's worth it. Which is why it's hard to feel good about Google when our reward for fighting spam on our corner of the internet is to be spammed by merchants whipped into a state of panic by Google.
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  buro9, this is a great example of a well-maintained forum, and as such I agree that you're doing the right thing by ignoring link removal requests. Unfortunately, if you look at wider area of forums as a whole, a very large fraction of them are unmaintained, unpatched, or otherwise not kept safe from drive-by spamming. There are entire forum spamming software packages that will register spam users for dozens of different forums in order to drop spammy links. You can even lease the spamming software by the month. :(
  - buro9 12y ago
    Thanks, and I agree. But... it doesn't resolve the problem that publishers who always fought spam, who stayed as far from the SEO battles as possible, and who have largely spam-free sites, are now subject to a constant and increasing flow of link removal requests as a consequence of Google's pushback against the merchants who did use the more spammy SEO tactics.
  - liveoneggs 12y ago
    except when he is disavowed as all the removal emails say they will do. I've added rel="nofollow" as good-enough when trying to help out people throwing too-far of a net.
  - buro9 12y ago
    Also... what happens when, as a consequence of us ignoring requests, Google decide that a site with a high number of disavowed links is a spammy site? I figure already that you'll eventually consider that a valid signal, but I'm sure you could already check my site and that there must already be some disavowed links, yet you personally admit this is a well-maintained forum. There is a fear that we are being caught in the crossfire, and it's hard not to believe that quite a few of us are going to get hit by that crossfire.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
OPA_Member 12y ago
And there it is again, the point that the author of the article is making . . "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" When the truth of the matter is that it's Google's issue. Why does the burden of the cost have to be on the publisher? This is the 3rd time someone is pointing this out, and it pretty much showcases "Google"'s attitude on this. At this point the cost of becoming a good source of information has increased greatly to the point that very few publishers with resources can actively manage all the rules and "guidelines" Google decides to throw at the content creators that provide the content that makes the search engine valuable. I see this everyday in our business as smaller but richer sources of content just disappear on many topics. Blogs, forums and independent enthusiast content sources. Google has created a one sided ecosystem. That is consolidating traffic to so called "good" sites. As a long time publisher for a large media company I think it's time to take the internet back from Google. Who care's what Google thinks and does and start building for a better internet.
- 205guy 12y ago
  I've read the thread up to here, and I do think Google is to blame for some heavy-handedness and some rather tone-deaf spokespeople (not that Matt_Cutts ever identified himself as speaking for Google, though he acts like it). But I think the bigger point that everybody is missing is that the Internet has become awash in all sorts of information, "good" and "bad," well-curated and spammy, human- and machine-generated, white-hat and black-hat. Just because YOU post information, and post a blog article about how it is good information, doesn't make it so or not so to an objective observer. Google is what it is: trying to sift through all that information algorithmically and using some forms of AI so it can extract what humans think is good information. I agree that a good forum that has good policies is getting hurt by some of google's actions, but it's the larger system, not Google. To make an analogy: almost everybody drives and everybody uses roads, but nobody should say: I'm a good driver or I don't drive, I've never been in an accident, therefore I cannot be in an accident. With all the information and intents behind such information on the Internet, and with google as the self-appointed traffic laws, there is still bound to be some collateral damage, sometimes because of how Google tries to deal with the dreck. As an aside, one can view Google as a just one way of monetizing information on the Internet, competing and co-existing with many other ways. You can also view it as a giant AI algorithm that gets rewarded (advertising revenue) when it finds the good information that humans are looking for and defends itself against others who have other interests.
mcintyre1994 12y ago
Is HN an example of a site that makes it trivially easy to sign up and drop a link on the user profile page?
RealGeek 12y ago
Yes, we get tons of spams on our blogs and forums. Thanks to Google for creating these parasites. The link-spam problem has been caused by Google in the first place. I don't remember getting such spam in a pre-Google Internet world. Small website owners like us may not have the technology and human resources to combat such spam. Therefore, we are caught up in the fire and get penalized by Google.
us0r 12y ago
" "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close." Wouldn't that be like every vBulletin site?
josephjrobison 12y ago
Are you not able to simply ignore bad links because when you did that years ago, people would just pump and dump thousands of links to see what stuck?

buro9 12y ago

> For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close. It isn't, and never has been. We operate a nursery period ( https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html ) in which the actions of new members are both severely restricted and observed by existing members, and all initial content must be 100% public and observable by members (no private messages, no user profile customisations). We very aggressively remove content and ban anyone who creates any content that appears spammy and continue to encourage reports of spam even long after they have been registered. We report those individuals to http://www.stopforumspam.com/ http://www.stopforumspam.com/ at the same time preventing signups from anyone that SFS reports as coming from an IP recently used to spam. Comments are run through the Akismet API and moderated if they are flagged as spam. When a spammer is caught (a few times a year someone does get past all of this - for a very brief moment), then every piece of content of theirs, and any other content from nearby IPs is reviewed and usually removed. We made profile pages non-public, we even removed the customised profile fields from display (though we do leave them in the form as it helps us spot any scripts that are trying to spam us and we autoban them). To put it mildly, we are aggressive. We've made a really poor experience for new members of our community to help ensure the quality of the content on the site and that we're free from spam. We felt that was worth it from day one, we still feel that it's worth it. Which is why it's hard to feel good about Google when our reward for fighting spam on our corner of the internet is to be spammed by merchants whipped into a state of panic by Google.

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
buro9, this is a great example of a well-maintained forum, and as such I agree that you're doing the right thing by ignoring link removal requests. Unfortunately, if you look at wider area of forums as a whole, a very large fraction of them are unmaintained, unpatched, or otherwise not kept safe from drive-by spamming. There are entire forum spamming software packages that will register spam users for dozens of different forums in order to drop spammy links. You can even lease the spamming software by the month. :(
- buro9 12y ago
  Thanks, and I agree. But... it doesn't resolve the problem that publishers who always fought spam, who stayed as far from the SEO battles as possible, and who have largely spam-free sites, are now subject to a constant and increasing flow of link removal requests as a consequence of Google's pushback against the merchants who did use the more spammy SEO tactics.
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  except when he is disavowed as all the removal emails say they will do. I've added rel="nofollow" as good-enough when trying to help out people throwing too-far of a net.
- buro9 12y ago
  Also... what happens when, as a consequence of us ignoring requests, Google decide that a site with a high number of disavowed links is a spammy site? I figure already that you'll eventually consider that a valid signal, but I'm sure you could already check my site and that there must already be some disavowed links, yet you personally admit this is a well-maintained forum. There is a fear that we are being caught in the crossfire, and it's hard not to believe that quite a few of us are going to get hit by that crossfire.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

OPA_Member 12y ago

And there it is again, the point that the author of the article is making . . "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" When the truth of the matter is that it's Google's issue. Why does the burden of the cost have to be on the publisher? This is the 3rd time someone is pointing this out, and it pretty much showcases "Google"'s attitude on this. At this point the cost of becoming a good source of information has increased greatly to the point that very few publishers with resources can actively manage all the rules and "guidelines" Google decides to throw at the content creators that provide the content that makes the search engine valuable. I see this everyday in our business as smaller but richer sources of content just disappear on many topics. Blogs, forums and independent enthusiast content sources. Google has created a one sided ecosystem. That is consolidating traffic to so called "good" sites. As a long time publisher for a large media company I think it's time to take the internet back from Google. Who care's what Google thinks and does and start building for a better internet.

205guy 12y ago
I've read the thread up to here, and I do think Google is to blame for some heavy-handedness and some rather tone-deaf spokespeople (not that Matt_Cutts ever identified himself as speaking for Google, though he acts like it). But I think the bigger point that everybody is missing is that the Internet has become awash in all sorts of information, "good" and "bad," well-curated and spammy, human- and machine-generated, white-hat and black-hat. Just because YOU post information, and post a blog article about how it is good information, doesn't make it so or not so to an objective observer. Google is what it is: trying to sift through all that information algorithmically and using some forms of AI so it can extract what humans think is good information. I agree that a good forum that has good policies is getting hurt by some of google's actions, but it's the larger system, not Google. To make an analogy: almost everybody drives and everybody uses roads, but nobody should say: I'm a good driver or I don't drive, I've never been in an accident, therefore I cannot be in an accident. With all the information and intents behind such information on the Internet, and with google as the self-appointed traffic laws, there is still bound to be some collateral damage, sometimes because of how Google tries to deal with the dreck. As an aside, one can view Google as a just one way of monetizing information on the Internet, competing and co-existing with many other ways. You can also view it as a giant AI algorithm that gets rewarded (advertising revenue) when it finds the good information that humans are looking for and defends itself against others who have other interests.

mcintyre1994 12y ago

Is HN an example of a site that makes it trivially easy to sign up and drop a link on the user profile page?

RealGeek 12y ago

Yes, we get tons of spams on our blogs and forums. Thanks to Google for creating these parasites. The link-spam problem has been caused by Google in the first place. I don't remember getting such spam in a pre-Google Internet world. Small website owners like us may not have the technology and human resources to combat such spam. Therefore, we are caught up in the fire and get penalized by Google.

us0r 12y ago

" "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close." Wouldn't that be like every vBulletin site?

josephjrobison 12y ago

Are you not able to simply ignore bad links because when you did that years ago, people would just pump and dump thousands of links to see what stuck?