shortbus1662 - 7:15 pm on Jun 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

Wow! One question is certainly better than none!

The Google Guy quote below my question should be EVERYONE'S answer to the thread about spam reporting and how Google feels about it. Now, onto my question.

If someone (theoretically of course) was trying to get back in google should they be afraid the following issue might be holding them out...

Let's say a site is providing content for many other sites in the way of forum software using one database. This means duplicate content on the sites that use this same forum DB because a post on one site shows up on all of them. It is certainly not for the purpose of spamming the search engines with content, rather providing the other sites with content so they gain value for their visitors, while they display the original site's ads in return for said content. I guess it would be sort of an interactive RSS if you will...

Should the site in question do a noindex/nofollow for those other sites (taking away one benefit from them participating - search engine traffic) or is it okay to do this?

to report spam. If you're a whitehat and don't like to see spam at all, it's good to report it. If you're a blackhat and want to report spam so that your site can do better, it's good to report it. If you're of the species of blackhat that will do absolutely anything to try to rank, from blogspam to referrer spam, yet you shun the idea of reporting spam because of your belief system, power to you then too--don't use the form. happy!