Award Sites

Do they help PR?

[JudgeJeffries]

Does an entry on an award site assist with PR and if it does are there any dangers a la guest book entries.

[rfgdxm1]

Should help with PR. And, there should be no dangers with guestbook entries, as competitors could add your URL to a lot of them. I wasn't aware of this until recently, but there are companies out there that will spam guestbooks for money. It is literally that easy to get any URL spammed to guestbooks.

[bocaguy6]

I kind of think guestbooks have to work a little..

Its still work getting your posts in them.

You get exposure ,But i guess the exposure and link value would be less or have less value

[rfgdxm1]

Even if Google ever manages to ignore all guestbook links, there will still be spammers who do it for click through value. I've seen lots of guestbooks with balatant spamming like "Visit the XXX site for hot, horny Asian girls" and such. This is so blatantly spammy that it encourages the site owner to delete it. If someone were spamming with just the intent of higher PR, then they want to drop their URL, with some compliment to the site owner or such that wouldn't encourage them to delete it.

[Brett_Tabke]

>Does an entry on an award site assist with
>PR and if it does are there any
>dangers a la guest book entries.

Yes, they could be viewed as a link farm. If all the award winners are made to run the awards page, then you have a link farm. It's clear that many have been found and pr0'd.

[Oaf357]

Rather interesting. I just had a page on my site listed in a Linux resource directory. Would that be considered a link farm. It is in the purest sense of a link farm but the sites that are listed have significant, related, moderated content. Would that still be considered a link farm?

[yankee]

If you are required to put a page on your site which lists all the award winning sites, then it is a link farm. If they just included you in their directory you have nothing to worry about, and will probably benefit.

[rfgdxm1]

If this is just a one way link to you, no problem.

[Brett_Tabke]

Even a one way link back to them is a-ok. It's when there is a specific page you have to run that's a problem. I seem to recall a site dropping from pr7 to 4 after a set of awards pages were pr0'd. Seemed to be quite a fuss about it at the time.

[JudgeJeffries]

So that means I'm ok if I just put the site forward for an award without doing anything further?
If thats the case then why is there all this hand wringing about guest books which seem to be in a similar category?

[rfgdxm1]

The difference here is presumably the webmaster has to consciously choose whether or not to get an award. This is only like guestbooks if the "award" is guaranteed for all. Presumably there is no danger with guestbooks beyond the links on them being ignored. Google has no way of knowing who added guestbook links, so penalizing the site linked to would be inappropriate. And, it doesn't make sense to penalize the site with the guestbook, because guestbooks have been around longer than Google itself.