rel="nofollow" for all forum posts

1. 77

   lobobrandonposted 11 years ago

   I doubt the links in the forum posts carry much weightage in anyway. Therefore, I suggest that all links here be no-followed.
   
   Reasons:
   Other than normal chit chat one of the main posts include those of content thieves. People don't break up the links so as to prevent them from forming and why should they when they can all be no follow instead?
   
   There are thousands of links by now and I'm sure the reputation of the site would be damaged at least a bit (After all the forums are not on their own subdomain now). It's on the hubpages domain. Possiblty the Editors Choice hubs could be affected because of these crazy links too. You never know what kind of penalties are around the corner.

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   1. 70

      Matthew Meyerposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      We already set users with a HubberScore below a threshold so all their links are nofollow in the forums and Hubs.
      I can bring up the idea of nofollow for all links in the forum in our next community meeting.

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      1. 74

         Reality Bytesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Hmm,  I receive traffic from my forum posts.  Always have.  Making the forum "nofollow" would definitely remove any benefits to participating in the conversations.
         
         Think about this before making a decision!

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         1. 94

            wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Why?  Anyone clicking the link will still go through, google's bots simply won't follow it.  You would lose any link juice, but that's all.  Traffic should remain.

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            1. 74

               Reality Bytesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               Let me think for a second.
               
               Doesn't each post offer a backlink to a profile page?

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         2. 77

            lobobrandonposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            You're not going to lose any traffic. It's just as wilderness stated.

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      2. 77

         lobobrandonposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         That's true Matthew and it's great that it works that way. But, people posting links of scrapers are usually people who are involved on the site and hence have a higher score (So their links are followed). Probably if you'll could work on a way wherein the links posted in the body of the posts (Not the users subdomain) are no-followed that would make everyone happy. Still, according to me the links don't do much, but why take a risk?

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2. 43

   Writer Foxposted 11 years ago

   I think the entire forum should be off-limit to search engines.  There's nothing of value here to anyone outside of the HubPages community and offering these pages to Google diminishes the overall quality of the HP website.  These are not quality pages.

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   1. 79

      TIMETRAVELER2posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Writer Fox: I have felt this way for some time.  When the forums get ugly, as they often do, I do not think it's good PR let alone good for HP.

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   2. 77

      lobobrandonposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      That's an even better suggestion than what I've said

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3. 79

   Greekgeekposted 11 years ago

   Except that Google and Matt Cutts talk about rewarding sites that provide service, interactivity, and engagement to users. A lot of the recent guidelines have been about, "what do you give your visitors?"
   
   Google's algorithm is intelligent enough to understand the difference between forum content and regular site content.
   
   I think it would be counter-productive to conceal a useful part of the site when there is absolutely no indication that Google penalizes sites with forums. If members had spammy signature links, that might be a problem, but our no-signature forums are actually less spammy than most sites.
   
   I am extremely dubious about nofollowing the forums, but whatever. But if you start talking about telling Google not to look at a piece of the site that's useful... and it makes it harder for members to search for and find help on Hubpages because that resource has disappeared from the Google index... no. Just no. You'd better be 110% sure that it's what's causing your traffic woes before you start flailing like that.

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   1. 43

      Writer Foxposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      These forums have no benefit to anyone outside of the HubPages community.  They are not for the engagement of visitors to the site. Some Web forums are about subjects people do search for and they belong in the index. Blocking HP forums from search engines increases the crawl priority to Hubs. Yes, Google can 'see' what is on here: useless information for its index published on the HP site. HubPages removed some older posts from search engine access for this reason.  It should remove the rest as well. HubPages traffic isn't flailing; it's rapidly falling. You have said that your income here has fallen, too. (My traffic is good.)

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      1. 89

         Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         ''Blocking HP forums from search engines increases the crawl priority to Hubs'
         
         Is Google search engine power especially pitiful at present?

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         1. 43

            Writer Foxposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Do a search for Google crawl priority if you're really interested, Willy.

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      2. 66

         SerraBposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Auntie Em, I wouldn't be comparing your earnings to GG's.

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4. 89

   Will Apseposted 11 years ago

   I don't know why I am taking this seriously, but then it is monsoon season...
   
   Anyway...
   
   site:hubpages.com/forum  About 21,400 results
   
   site:hubpages.com  About 576,000 results
   
   So the forum is about 3 or 4 per cent of the site as a whole (roughly).
   
   Lets hope those forum posts are not too tiring....

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   1. 43

      Writer Foxposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      That's exactly the problem.  There are only 360,017 featured Hubs on the site.
      
      You still don't get crawl priority, do you?

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5. 79

   Greekgeekposted 11 years ago

   WriterFox, you don't have to block something entirely from Google's index; you can specify crawl priority in the sitemap. Or at least, I learned how to do so when I set one up ten years ago — lately I've been lazy-ass and trusting WP software to auto-generate sitemaps — but I assume that functionality hasn't been removed from sitemaps. Or has it?
   
   My Hub traffic and income aren't particulary relevant here, since they're content pages, not forum pages, and they're off in their own subdomains. Google can certainly tell the difference betwen them and forums. So I'm not sure why you're bringing up my income. But if you want to use that as some kind of evidence (!?)... er... feel free? Here's the main account's analytics dump.
   
   
   
   Income is in lockstep with traffic, fluctuations with a modest gain over the past year, so, make of it what you will.
   
   Where are people getting this idea that Google wants forums noindexed?  Can you point to something in webmaster guidelines I missed? It's not something I've seen any major website do, so I am extremely puzzled.

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