Reporting Web Rings

web rings and Google

[Trodda]

Will Google take any action against web rings? We have a competitor who is using "no script" tags to hide a large web ring of over 50 websites. Is it worth reporting something like this?

Thanks
Trodda

[deejay]

Why would you bother to report this?

If the webring is structured in such a way that it isn't visible to Google then it's no win/no loss for the site.

Webrings, much as I personally dislike the way they are presented, can actually be very good for the user (thinking of craft type webrings I've seen in particular) and a great way for small sites to build a network within their field. Certainly many of them are much more on-topic and of interest to the surfer than your average links page.

I haven't yet seen a webring that I've thought "oooo... they've done that for Google's sake!"

[Trodda]

The links are not visible to the public, but are visible to Google. Also, this is not webring in the true sense, more of a link farm type set up. It is not the intention for any of the links to be industry related, but rather just for each site to benefit from the popularity.

[Nick_W]

If it bothers you, do what you feel you need to do. No offence intended as I'm certain it's a big issue for you or your company but I'm not a fan of 'reporting threads'.

Either do it or don't. ;)

Nick

[heini]

Trodda, if it's a link farm than it's not a webring.
Hidden links don't make any sense for a webring, as those are designed to let users interested in a topic browse the participating sites.

Just to make sure we don't give webrings a bad name here :)

[Nick_W]

That's a good point Heini, totally missed that! - I've found webrings to be quite useful, especially on non-competitive terms where the sites may not rank for what you might expect in the SE's.

Nick

[DaveN]

webrings are fine in one industry that we are in we get more from the webring than google and we are #1 in google.

DaveN

[Trodda]

Sorry, definitely confused a few of you with the webring term. Reason I posted is to find out what Google's stance would be on the hidden link farm type set up. Will they take action against this?

[madweb]

Both hidden links and link farms are disapproved of by google, so a hidden link farm would be a double whammy.

However i'm sure google gets far too many spam reports to attend to every individual one, so whether they will do anything about it is a rather different question.

Somtimes it helps if you mention your webmasterworld nick in the spam report somewhere.

[Trodda]

Thanks Madweb.