How to issue a gentle warning to people overusing the quote feature

[Anthony Parsons]

Google considers quoted text being duplicate text, so overquoting has significant SEO implications.

Correct. That has always been the basis for why the rule has always existed on my site.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Google considers quoted text being duplicate text, so overquoting has significant SEO implications. That alone is a sufficient enough reason to keep quoting on any given page to a minimum.

Correct. That has always been the basis for why the rule has always existed on my site.

Mostly quoting to be snarky, but do either of you have evidence for this?

I am looking for something substantial but can't seem to find anything. I find a lot of sites that indicate duplicate content is not a significant contributor to SEO, but not really any that say the opposite. Google actually states in multiple places that they don't punish duplicate content unless they detect it to be malicious or manipulative.

Given that quoting has been a standard way to reply to user generated content for as long as the internet has been around (and even before then), I'm having a hard time believing that Google isn't handling it in some kind of intelligent way. It would be incredibly detrimental to Google themselves to wholesale-devalue every site on the planet where normal discussions are taking place.

I'd love to see any reading you might have on this subject.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

I'm having a hard time believing that Google isn't handling it in some kind of intelligent way

Google handles a lot of things intelligently, no argument to that; the issue is that Google themselves have always stated you should not leave things to them if you can ensure compliancy directly, as Google are not perfect.

Getting punished by Google because you have thread after thread with multiple content is a tough ask to then get in contact with someone at Google who cares enough to fix the issue for your one site. Do you imagine how many requests Google get that a punished site isn't doing anything wrong? Undoing those things is also another issue.

 

[Glockie]

Agreed, I find the whole quoting thing/fad can handy if in a busy and lively thread, which you've not responded to in some time, and you need clarification or are replying directly to someone from wayyy back in the posts etc.
But the 'you quote / I quote' fashion that exists here and another site similar to this, does happen a hell of a lot.
For me, it just adds clutter to what I am trying to read (nevermind the implications of it) and can just be so overused.
I agree with many who've posted - it happens way too much here and yes it annoys the hell out of me too, when it's overused and a bit unnecessary.

lol I saw a thread almost turn into a flame recently on another site, because someone literally became narked that one or two people, weren't using the quote system.
It actually was a deadly serious issue and this person was seriously blowing steam.. I found it hilarious

 

[Ridemonkey]

Google handles a lot of things intelligently, no argument to that; the issue is that Google themselves have always stated you should not leave things to them if you can ensure compliancy directly, as Google are not perfect.

Getting punished by Google because you have thread after thread with multiple content is a tough ask to then get in contact with someone at Google who cares enough to fix the issue for your one site. Do you imagine how many requests Google get that a punished site isn't doing anything wrong? Undoing those things is also another issue.

I'm not saying that they're perfect.

It seems a little far fetched, though. That Google, after 17 years of developing search algorithms, has completely failed to deal with the single most popular method of conversing on the internet, and that nobody seems to be writing about it, and Google hasn't issued any kind of guidance about it.

I know SEO is a little bit of a black box, but I have trouble believing that, with all the SEO literature out there, nobody seems to be observing this basic phenomenon that would be affecting a dramatic majority of sites on the internet.

 

[JackieChun]

@Ridemonkey It does, in fact, take a lot of manual work to reach SEO "zen" with forums. If you want proof, just look at how unintelligently Google indexes phpBB and vBulletin forums. Every post of each thread gets a separate URL, and multiple versions of the same content (such as Print view, Archived view, etc) all get separate URLs and all of that garbage gets indexed by Google. If you've every tried to manage a vBulletin or phpBB forum from Google Webmaster Tools, you know how many warnings Google gives about duplicate titles, metadata, etc. In fact, Google is so bad at indexing forums, that very often it will index duplicate threads at the expense of unique content. Again, Google Webmaster Tools will give you that exact information and much more.

So when it comes to massive amounts of duplicate text copied and pasted via quoting, it's best not to take any chances, especially considering that it looks like crap and is completely unnecessary.

 

[Alpha1]

So what is the point of quote and multiquote when we can quote selectively?
I think a lot of the unnecessary quotes are caused by people who want to reply to someone. It would make more sense if a reply would add a usertag instead of a quote.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

that would be affecting a dramatic majority of sites on the internet.

Really? A dramatic majority of sites on the internet? Forums are a handful of nothing compared to the sites on the Internet.

 

[Ridemonkey]

@JackieChun Sure, I've managed both of those forum types and I definitely understand some of the indexing problems.

I think we should be separating out mechanical issues from logical ones. There's a mechanical issue with indexing certain types of software, where permalinks to posts or different display formats have independent identities inside the forum software. These identities appear to be completely unique pages to any crawler - or, indeed, to visitors. It's a function of the software maintaining unique content views for the same actual content.

This isn't endemic to the internet, it's just a method that those software packages use to present information. Case in point, XenForo does not have this issue because it doesn't present individual posts as unique pages. It's true, Google hasn't created specific spider logic to discard certain types of pages generated by one out of a million content publishing platforms. Arguably, it would be incorrect for them to do so since it removes a webmaster's ability to determine what they want listed (e.g. I might only want individual posts listed instead of thread pages).

Quoting other users is a basic, logical aspect of the entire communications function of the internet. It's just how users talk to each other. The fact that Google doesn't like vB's ten billion permalinks doesn't mean they're so inept as to wholly discard basic human behavior when doing content indexing.

I'm not sure either of us knows the answer to the question at hand, I just don't see the logical conclusion here that one of the largest behavioral research companies on the planet doesn't understand that people tend to quote each other when communicating via text.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Really? A dramatic majority of sites on the internet? Forums are a handful of nothing compared to the sites on the Internet.

Forums are not the only place where people communicate. Text is quoted in basically any area of the internet where people talk to each other - blogs, social media, news article comments, mailing list archives, usenet, anywhere.

 

[JackieChun]

@Ridemonkey

First, you are grossly exaggerating the role of quoting in Internet communications. It's definitely not used in social media comments and almost never in blog comments. Also, usenet is dead (sorry for the bad news). Quoting is used in email for easy reference to earlier text, but even that's become a lot less useful now that most people use threaded/conversation view.

Yes, there are some people who always insist on quoting. There are others who don't. Many of those who don't intend to quote somehow still end up using lots and lots of quoted text. Why? Because they press the XenForo reply button, which results in quoting, whether they wanted it or not, and they just assume the quoted text is supposed to be there (just like in an email reply).

Forum threads are linear, read from top to bottom. When replying to threads, you have to keep in mind the interests of all future readers, who really don't give a damn about reading something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam sodales felis lorem, eget luctus nunc dignissim a. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Praesent ultricies enim nec tortor lacinia dignissim. Donec tincidunt elit sit amet odio ornare sodales. Praesent pellentesque nulla tempor scelerisque fringilla.

lol totally bro

Unless you are on page 3 of a thread and replying to someone on page 1, you can just tag the person and accomplish everything that quoting would have accomplished and more.

Second, the reason that XenForo doesn't have the problems that vBulletin and phpBB is because XenForo took the matter in its own hands and fixed the issue with Google's poor indexing, and that's exactly what we're trying to do here, take the matter in our own hands again.

 

[Ridemonkey]

I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'm not talking about a functional or cosmetic issue. I don't care about future readers. All those things are forum administrator choices.

From where I sit, there's no actual evidence that Google punishes sites for quoting. I know, I know - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Nonetheless, I don't find it compelling that (as I said previously) a company whose primary business is essentially human behavior has failed to notice that humans quote each other when talking online.

I would love to read anything to the contrary, though. I can't find anything published that looks reputable.

 

[JackieChun]

Well, your argument is "Google is too smart to be doing this" when I've already provided examples from personal experience that Google becomes more selective about which threads to index when a site becomes overfilled with crap. This also applies to threads that are spread over too many pages due a large number of BS replies.

If everybody trusted Google's wisdom and experience, then SEO basically wouldn't exist. The whole point of SEO is to get ahead by optimizing your site for search engines, sometimes by following Google guidance, and sometimes by avoiding it.

 

[Ridemonkey]

@JackieChun I hear you, but that's not my argument. My argument is, specifically, with a complete lack of evidence that this is happening, I find it plausible that a company possesses enough expertise to handle an issue that's fundamental to their business.

If there were evidence to the contrary, I would happily review it and throw out any assumption of competence.

 

[JackieChun]

Except that any plausibility of Google's presumed competence in the forum space goes out the window once you use Google Webmaster Tools to study any forum that has more than 10 thousand threads. You keep requesting evidence, and I've referred you to Google Webmaster Tools several times, which you have ignored.

By the way, you have taken this thread massively off-topic. My original post was asking fellow admins how to deal with people who abuse quoting, i.e. people like you. You coming in and arguing that overusing the quote feature is not all that bad is not addressing any of the issues that are actually relevant here.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Ah. You participate in a multi-post discussion with me and then, at the end of it, accuse me of taking the thread off topic.

Nice. Very nice.

When it comes to that, I think the conversation is over.

Except that any plausibility of Google's presumed competence in the forum space goes out the window once you use Google Webmaster Tools to study any forum that has more than 10 thousand threads. You keep requesting evidence, and I've referred you to Google Webmaster Tools several times, which you have ignored.

By the way, you have taken this thread massively off-topic. My original post was asking fellow admins how to deal with people who abuse quoting, i.e. people like you. You coming in and arguing that overusing the quote feature is not all that bad is not addressing any of the issues that are actually relevant here.

 

[Daniel Hood]

So what is the point of quote and multiquote when we can quote selectively?
I think a lot of the unnecessary quotes are caused by people who want to reply to someone. It would make more sense if a reply would add a usertag instead of a quote.

Interesting idea. I really do mean to quote most of the time but I think Twitter has embedded in a lot of people's mind, that 'Reply' works as just '@User ...'. It would be interesting to see '+ Quote' turn into 'Quote' and reply do what you mentioned.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Is there a way to control this use to avoid warning them? Like a daily quote limit or something similar?

Then when a user complains about the limit, you can respond saying something like "we must use this to prevent spam from potential spammer members, sorry for the inconvenience" without having to really offend a specific member.