rfgdxm1 - 6:22 pm on Jan 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

>Somebody listed my home page's URL in dozens (scores? hundreds?) of guestbooks months ago, and my home page is still PR6.

And, if Google were to penalize for this, any competitor or someone who just doesn't like you could just hire a bored teenager to add your URL to a hundred guestbooks in a day to get a site tossed out of Google. Heck, if this were the case someone out there is going to start advertising they'll sign hundreds of guestbooks with URLs of competitors you want to hose for a fee. ;) In the cut throat world of e-commerce, this surely would happen. And, no doubt the sort of people who e-mail bomb folks they don't like would also for the same reasons of spite, malice and revenge sign guestbooks to ruin even non-commercial sites.

If Google doesn't like guestbook links, in cases where they are found they shouldn't penalize the site, but just exclude them from the count. Better yet, algorithmically determine what pages are guestbooks, and ignore them. Also, with guestbooks almost always having a huge number of entries, combined with typically low PR, if anyone thinks the way to get on the top of Google is to sign a lot of guestbooks, they probably are fools. Better to work on getting sites with decent PR to link to you, rather than waste time with guestbooks.