Google SEO

[Salty]

Interesting article I read today

Simply put, anchor text is the text in a link.

Anchor text is important because search engines use it in their algorithms to determine their rankings. Here’s how it works. Search engines are constantly checking the anchor text of your site. Each time you get a link from another site, the search engines will note the anchor text of that link. With each instance a word or phrase shows up in your anchor text, your chances improve for increasing your ranking for that word or phrase.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-organized-crime-is-taking-control-of-googles-search-results

 

[AnthonyCea]

Smart man who has conducted some great research, but this is not SEO, it is Spam-E-O automated link spamming and link dumping, Google will filter it out, Matt Cutts addressed this issue and has placed the responsibility on forum owners to keep link spamming under control, if they allow bots to dump anchor text links on their forums Google will de-index their sites in the end.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/

read my comments (4 posts) at the end and follow the links in the posts to see how Black Hat Spam-E-O morons are targeting your forums looking to conduct automated link spamming.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/#comment-552286

 

[Salty]

You provided a ton of good links in the blog comments.

Good read.

 

[AnthonyCea]

One can see the big picture by following the links because then you will understand what Black Hat Spam-E-O morons are up to and will see how your fellow webmasters are responsible for spamming your forums.

 

[Salty]

Do you think there is some way to gauge a website's discussion interactivity and base it on that?

Would something like this open up the possibility of bigger exploits? Is there anyway to revolve it around discussion for it to be fair?

Such as, reviews ranking high on Google Maps.

 

[AnthonyCea]

If you want to rank in Google they do think highly of original content found no where else on the web, they also like to see a lot of fresh content everyday from a domain, so if you can do those things you will rank.

What Matt Cutts is saying to forum owners is don't let members anchor text spam your forums and dump links in user profiles, some Black Hat Spam-e-o morons register thousands of accounts on forums with Xrumer just to dump links in user profile signature and homepage slots.

 

[Salty]

Do you believe that if/when they lower the value of anchor text links, discussion-based content will begin to be more valuable?

 

[AnthonyCea]

Google ranks based on over 100 or more factors including domain trust rank and so on, in the end link spammers get de-indexed, so even though they might rank for a while based on a number of anchor text links Google will catch them and de-index their domains.

Forums with solid content already rank high, this forum ranks very well with old established forums and it is new, mostly because of unique content and a lot of sites linking to this place.

 

[Salty]

If "catching and de-indexing" is their fight against the un-evenness of text link spam, is anything "real" been announced in regards to stopping this from continuing?

 

[AnthonyCea]

De-indexing a site is Google's way of penalizing sites that allow spam and link spamming, there are a number of sites including this one that place no follow tags on outgoing links within threads and signature link slots, so it is up to the webmaster to protect his own domain against Google penalization.

I don't know if there is a way to stop spambot operators other than using some of the firewalls and spambot IP databases like www.botscout.com to block them, forum software developers are also making adjustments to stop machine gun spambot operators from being able to register forum accounts in the first place, something that should have been done 5 years ago.

 

[Salty]

When you say, forum software developers are making adjustments, would the assumption of vbulletin 3.x users not having this in place a serious issue to consider? Do you believe that link bot spam affects many of the forum community with the same software adoption?

Thus contributing to many de-indexing of pages that shouldn't be? Hurting that site's rank?

 

[AnthonyCea]

Yes, I have seen many vB 3 forums with a lot of spam on them, when the owners give up spammers take over, so anyone running old scripts who allow new members to post without moderation are at risk if spam threads are visible to the public.

 

[Salty]

Good stuff, thanks for the replies.