Why punish sites for links from message boards?

makes no sense to me

[NotePad]

i understand some people spam boards with their own URL, but i get referals from many message boards that people post on their own to help their members with a question they had...why is this a penalty?

[mosley700]

Precisely. Google should NOT be crawling message boards - why is Google crawling message boards and then penalizing the sites it finds.

[Shak]

there is a difference between a user/member of your site recommending it on a forum..

and

some of the sig lines posted by webmasters, done purely for backlink purposes.

I had the pleasure the other day of a looking at a forum, where EVERY post was by an adult webmaster dropping their URL, the site was for kids.

Shak

[mosley700]

Shak, many people use their sig line just to identify themselves - some ODP editors use that URL in thier sig lines, so to be consistent Google should PR0 dmoz.

The best way is if Google stays off forums altogether.

[europeforvisitors]

What evidence do you have that Google is punishing sites for having links from message boards?

It's far more likely that Google simply ignores links from message boards.

[borisbaloney]

I have serious doubts that links from message boards make any difference _unless_ they come from high PR boards. I have included my link in my sig for a while now without any recognition from google except on one particularly high profile board where it counted as a genuine PR 4 link.

I wouldn't be concerned about being penalised for contributing positively to a board.

Moosly700: How did u go getting your site reincluded? Did GG help u out?

[deft_spyder]

i have had incoming links from high PR sites because it is in my sig.

Google has stated that incoming links cannot penalize you, otherwise people could post to boards, guestbooks, and hurt your site.

only manual link farm penalties, etc, can hurt you.

[yosmc]

Message boards often contain valuable information - just look around. :) From a surfer's point of view (which is what counts, I believe) I see absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be indexed...

[mosley700]

Moosly700: How did u go getting your site reincluded? Did GG help u out?

GG said my site is clean and he said he would investigate. I trust he will take care of it.

[mosley700]

Message boards often contain valuable information - just look around

Yes they are valuable, but Google should not count the links within forums in calculating PR. Many peoples' sig lines have nothing to do with the subject matter of the forum. Google should, in my opinion, just disregard all links found in message boards.

[steveb]

There is a site that went from #13 on very tough two word keyword to #1 from message board posts. Should they be penalized for this? Well they are clearly spamming, doing something non-content-wise to raise their rank in a completely arbitrary way... but they shouldn't be penalized actually, those links should be ignored. I don't know how easy that is, but in their case they got most of their links from sites that have vizbook/vizbook.htm pages. Ignoring such pages should be not impossible.

This site doesn't deserve its ranking by any measure of quality, content or genuine links. This guestbook hooey needs to be dealt with.

[Chris_R]

Message boards often contain valuable information - just look around. :) From a surfer's point of view (which is what counts, I believe) I see absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be indexed...

I couldn't agree more. Google should index everything. If there are links in there - so what. How much credit do you think you are going to get for a few lousy links on a board full of sig lines?

People see stuff happen and think what they observed was the cause. People that "spam" message boards - are also more likely to use other agressive techniques -any one of which might cause what is being observed.