Forum Moderators: open
Every posting (message) gets made with a meta title, description and keywords (according to the subject stated by the person posting). At the moment, I am allowing / suggesting Google to crawl everything, including the archived message files (I keep the last 12 months postings and directory page so that people can search it).
At the moment the messages / postings (which do appear on Google quite well), simply have well anchored links back to the main index and actual forum page (unlike most wwwboards, my board uses a secondary page, main.html, to avoid the index page being too big for an index page).
My questions are;
1) Is it good to have such a HUGE site (page wise) with Google? Of course, each page is different according to what each person posts about.
2) I have a sister commercial site. Which is cross linked at directory (index.html, main.html, etc.) level. Should I also put a link to my commerical site from each posting / message html?
2. I see no reason for that helping your board to get indexed more fully. I would guess that linking out to independant sites would help more. Why would googlebot keep on crawling your board if it always ends in inner cirles within the same board/commercial site?
Thanks.
I have done everything possible to stop giving away PR via external links by;
a) Using a cgi click through script for static links on reference / information pages to 3rd party sites.
b) Using another cgi click through script to stop people planting their URL's in messages for Spam purposes.
With both, Google can not see the target URL.
Do you think this actually hurts my site, rather then helps?
I had thought about putting another page up for reciprocal links. So, if a site (who appears on a reference page) reciprocal links, I can give something back. The trouble is, when outbound links were king, my site did great. Then outbound links diluted PR, so it slipped and I had to take action. Now I wonder.
My forum is HUGE, and gets a lot of traffic by token of people searching for "blue widgets forum". But for "blue widgets", it does not do so well.
Note that that is something different than letting everyone sign their posting with their url.
No exact scientific data here, just what I would appreciate if being a search engine and a user. (should be the other way around :))
Oh, I agree 100%. I would prefer to have direct links from my information pages. But these were killing me, so I had to go the click through cgi script route.
And I am against reciprocal linking as well, but I have just been forced into doing this, as so many sites get false PR by this method. Again I have no choice. When you look at other sites with link pages from completely off subject sites, and then see they have huge PR's because of it, what else can you do?
What I was thinking, is to have information pages with click through links Google can not determine the destination URL from. Then have a special section / pages, where I can put those direct links. Both to maintain some level of Internet fairness (so they get something, as they should), without killing the actuall subject pages.
I think Google was better when it gave benefit to external links (I know this got abused easily), and wonder if they do now again. This is yet another reason why I would like to have a direct links page / pages. If I am linking to other authoritive sites, maybe this will help my site generally as well.
Does anyone have opinion on whether external links help in any way now with Google? I did ask before but no-one answered.
Does anyone have opinion on whether external links help in any way now with Google? I did ask before but no-one answered.
I'd like to know the answer to that one too...if there is one.
If you were Google and the main factor in your algo and in connecting the various pages of the www are links, and you read on certain forums that everyone is trying to limit outward external linking in some form or the other in order to "hoard pagerank", would you do something about it?
also:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Which scientific papers often are not even accepted for review by their peers?
those that do not mention correct sources, origin of quotes, or related work in the same field relevant to the subject.
If it is a spam problem in your board, it needs moderation, if moderation is way-out, I would not be suprised if Google just disregards all the link dropping in the forum part of your site in some way or other, now or in the future.
Thanks for the pointers.
Is that why link exchange sites seem to be doing so well right now? In that;
a) They have plenty of 3rd party (inbound?) links?
b) They have plenty of outbound links, so are regarded as an authority?
c) Because their outbound links are on special pages (no the main directory pages), they do not lose PR from the all important pages?
If this is true, tt seems like a light just came on for me, but I don't like what I see! And it gets me back to that same old, well chewed over dilema - to reciprocal link or not to reciprocal link (I believe sooner or later Google will find the Spam algo for this, and reciprocal link sites will get burried - or am I wrong?).
Help!
I believe sooner or later Google will find the Spam algo for this, and reciprocal link sites will get burried - or am I wrong?).
I believe they already have the tools, it just takes the implementation.
It is not about burrying them, its about neutralising any artificial beneficial effect.
From Google's viewpoint it might be better to let the "manipulators" set up their farms. Once done they can be (automatically) identified. Excess can be neutralised manually.
