Googlebot hitting me HARD - Page 2

Pimpen 2010 · 10-26-2003, 11:13 AM

lmao! ahhhhh hahahahaa

Leader of Men · 10-26-2003, 12:12 PM

I wanted it to sound bad

And yes, John is my host.

I, Brian · 10-26-2003, 02:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by piramida

Rob, I find it extremely hard to believe that google would penalise a site for having words 'forum' on it. If that would be true, it will be a small SEO revolution, and surely a big wave of everyone renaming their forums to "chats", "lounges", "rooms" and so on. It just isn't hapenning; it's too easy to workaround and makes little sense since almost any site has some kind of forums and links to forums in menus and "discuss this on our forums" links on pages and whatnot.

Also, everyone knows that forums tend to rank high in google - it makes perfect sense, too, since goog is all about quality of information and where would you find a better information source than on-topic forums?

I don't find it hard at all to understand. And I'm sure it would be easy to figure out - and recognise - the biggest forum software providers (ie, vBulletin and phpbb).

I used to think that a forum was the easy road to high PR. Now I'm not so sure. I'm still watching the issue.

piramida · 10-27-2003, 12:23 AM

Quote:

I'm sure it would be easy to figure out - and recognise - the biggest forum software providers

and that would probably require inclusion of AI in google. not everyone leaves default templates, many heavily edit code. No, it can surely look for the 'Powered by' and cover 90% of smaller forums with that trick, but bigger forums don't have this line. Usually the only thing left from the default board software is the underlying engine - look at any forum with over 1K active users, it's either completely custom or heavily hacked vB/phpBB.

I, Brian · 10-27-2003, 01:14 AM

A lot of the larger forums are not actually indexed, though. So far as I can tell, the majority of them primarily build up PR through referral backlinks.

My chronicles-network forum had PR 6 with just a couple of hundred forum pages indexed as Yabb SE. Now there are almost 15,000 showing up on allinurl: since I upgraded it to vBulletin, and yet the PR is still 6.

*If* it's simply become a far higher PR6, then there's no issue,. However, I suspect that a prime issue is that similar content is simply ignored on the same site - John Scott posted an article covering the possibility on the old Webmaster Forum board. I think I'm seeing it implemented.

Mel · 10-27-2003, 01:40 AM

For whatever reason I can tell you that hundreds of links I had from various SEO forums are now not being shown.

What is interesting to me is that all links from older existing forums have been dropped, but links from newer forums seem to be reported.

Could it be that Google is just adding forums to a no credit list as they come to its attention?

PhilC · 10-27-2003, 05:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by I, Brian

I strongly suspect that Google has the algo fixed to give forums less weight in the PR calculation - so don't hold your breath about the PR increase.

I doubt that very much. Forums are not like guestbooks. Guestbooks are known to be used for links, but Forums produce current content, and Google is actively improving its 'current' capabilities. Besides, many forum threads have top rankings for good searchterms.

The PageRank increase within the site will occur, but it won't necessarily increase the Toolbar PR figure. It takes a lot of new pages to move up a Toolbar point. I took a site from PR4 to PR5 by adding about 1500 new pages, and adding over 20,000 took it from PR5 to PR6 - then it went back to PR5 when google messed with the way they handle backlinks.

Adding pages does increase the PageRank within a site but nowhere near as effectively as adding IBLs to the site.

PhilC · 10-27-2003, 05:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mel

For whatever reason I can tell you that hundreds of links I had from various SEO forums are now not being shown.

What is interesting to me is that all links from older existing forums have been dropped, but links from newer forums seem to be reported.

Could it be that Google is just adding forums to a no credit list as they come to its attention?

Forum pages are pages within a website and are treated as such, but links from forum pages are different.

Maybe the links from old forums have gone because the older forums have changed things so that the links aren't visible to spiders. But my best theory is that Google has implemented a system whereby it either ignores generic links entirely (links that are on just about all pages in a site), OR it progressively devalues them so that the first link counts, the next one counts less, and so on, OR it just counts one link from each site OR something similar.

Google did write about the idea of progressively devaluing repetitions of words on a page until any more instances had no effect. So the idea of progressively devaluing generic links must have occured to them.

Incidentally, Yahoo's backlinks have been in freefall for a while. They got up to over 1,100,000 a few months ago. Since then they've been steadily dropping as Google changes the way it deals with backlinks. They are now at 759,000 - almost a third of them have gone.

I, Brian · 10-27-2003, 07:02 AM

Another point about forum links is that as posts drop down the page index, their PR will become less. Those showing on the first page of a forum will have highest PR, because they are linked more directly from from site index page.

As for the value of roum pages - certainly I'll keep watching out.

John Scott · 10-27-2003, 11:18 AM

Forum links and top rankings in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...st.com+profile

His site in the #1 position:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...regnancy+signs

That guy registers on hundreds of forums every day. He has tons of #1 spots.

piramida · 10-27-2003, 11:26 AM

now thats an interesting way to get backlinks

burgi82 · 10-27-2003, 02:22 PM

I also participate in a few forums, and usually put my sites in the sig. My main site, which has only exchanged links with about 100 other sites, with none of the links being on higher PR pages (they are not shown by google), now has a PR of 6, and I think that it's mainly do to the sig at the forums I participate in.
Somebody mentioned that links from older forums don't show anymore. I also think that as the threads move down in the forums, they get less PR to them, because the thread may now be on page 2 or 5, or whatever.
So, I think that having posted in threads that are on the first page of a forum, will give you the highest PR.
But then, I also think that I should say that I sometimes see people posting just for the sake of getting their sig in the forum, and that just makes me mad sometimes, because they don't contribute at all to the discussion.
So, in conclusion, I think that posting in a forum is a good way to increase PR, but don't just post Spam, but be informative and write informative posts.