Just how much a Google Group posting helps building PR?

[McMohan]

Hope everyone has come out of Monday blues by now!

I have a question regarding the utility of posting in Google groups besides referrals. Does someone has the experience of posting in Google Groups and getting PR enhanced as a result? Is there any remote chance of this activity being considered as spamming?

Thank You all and have a great week ahead.

[McMohan]

Just dropped into make the question clear. I am talking of a posting with link to the site.

[tigger]

well google groups has a PR10 (don't see many of those going around) but all the other pages have a zero, so I would say it won't do anything for you

[steveb]

The interior google groups pages I checked are PR9. But my website has been linked hundreds of times from google groups and they never have shown up as backward links.

Newsgroups are good for attracting traffic if used responsibly, but I don't think they offer any page rank value at all.

[KakenBetaal]

I'd agree - no PR at all. Newsgroups are pretty good for building traffic to your site, though. I've spent years hanging out in some ngs building a reputation and plugging my site once in a while has done wonders for my traffic. I'm lucky in that my site is free informational and is hobby and newsgroup specific. That means I can easily drop thread-relevant URLs or new interesting material without getting scorned for spamming.

[BrunoDillen]

I think Google manually filters their Google groups, so that links won't count as inbound links. It's rather easy to "spam" these boards, and if they would let inbound links count from there, I guess a lot of people were going to spam the boards immediately.

I'm pretty sure that other users are posting your site as a valuable contribution to the Google groups, but Google can't figure out which one are the useful and the useless links, so they just filter out everything.

Hope you understand it, still working on my English ;)

[McMohan]

Thanx all. Just imagine this. If the URL posted in google group has the Key Phrase in it, will that come in for reckoning while ranking.. as a text in inbound link?

I m just trying to get something out of groups ;)

[tigger]

I don't think so, also how else to put a red flag in front of google!

[googler]

Well I had the same Idea.. I did 63 *informative* postings in related categories.. I haven't noticed any great change in the google ranking of my site, but I did notice .. well .. shed loads of hits from people browsing the groups ( alot which converted to sales, because of the targeted nature )...

I think the value of *related/targeted* news groups is often over looked.

[Eric_Jarvis]

I've been marketing using Usenet for over 5 years...the key thing is to ensure that somebody (either me or one of the staff from a client) who has some expertise related to the topic of the newsgroup becomes a regular user of the group...that way it isn't "spam"...it isn't against most charters...but when the site is relevant it ALWAYS gets a mention

it can lead to quite a bit of extra traffic

the other thing to do is, if you have good enough content, get existing regulars in the newsgroup to reference your site in their sig

[McMohan]

Now.. do we have reason enough to believe google never crawls its own groups?

[KakenBetaal]

Google definitely indexes google groups as they are searchable from the google interface. They have obviously made a decision (IMO the right one) not to count the links from the usenet archive.

I'd like to make the point that these are not Google's groups - it's actually usenet. Google simply provides the very useful service of archiving all the requests and making them searchable. (Well, it was Deja.com that started the process before Google did a Microsoft on them).

[Chris_R]

[groups.google.com...]

[bird]

If I remember correctly, then Googles usenet archive is signficantly larger than its web index. Using that data in the PageRang calculations would skew their results in a highly unpredictable manner, probably to the point of turning them useless.

[KakenBetaal]

Bird,

Google usenet archive:
"over 700 million messages"

Google web index:
"2,073,418,204 web pages"

So the web index is significantly bigger than the usenet archive. I still agree with you, though. I don't feel that usenet links are as valuable as the average website link as a PR vote.

[chiyo]

SPAM THEN AND NOW

When I see the occassional google groups referrer in my logs i get worried we might be caught for spamming! 7 years ago when we started our first site we used usenet a lot to announce updates. Back in those days people wrote back and said thanks! now of course its spam... :)

Seven years back - your sins may be forgiven by God over 7 years, but not by the internet!

We werent the only ones to do it back them. There is a plain post from a Jerry something in the groups archive from 8 years back or so announcing some modest site he and a few of his college buddies had made by collecting links that they had found and listing them, and inviting people to have a look...

Its so spooky it gives me goosebumps.