Does Google penalize Yahoo! Groups Links?

Just added my site to 25 Yahoo! Groups

[NickH]

I recently added my site to the Links section of about 25 Yahoo! Groups. All the Groups are closely related to the subject of my (non-commercial) site. All bar eight of the links will not be visible to Google (I guess), as they are accessible to members only.

Will Google penalize me posting eight identical links on Yahoo! Groups? (This *is* what the Links section is for, after all!)

Nick

[korkus2000]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld NickH,

No I don't think so. If anything it would ignore them if there was a problem.

[bird]

Yahoo groups requires cookies. Googlebot doesn't support cookies, so she won't even see the relevant pages.

[BigDave]

Yahoo lets googlebot spider the publicly available areas of the yahoo groups. Everything you can see when you are not logged in will get spidered.

In other words, it will never see you links from the members only areas.

If you actively participate in these groups already AND they make their member archive public, you should make sure that you put a link to your home page in your yahoo profile, and put a link to your site in your .sig. I have seen the profile of one of our group moderators get up to PR5 since he is very active in several groups and gets a link to his profile from the archive whenever he posts to the group.

Don't bother using this method if you are not already active in the groups. The PR gain is very small per message, and the farther you have to dig into the archive, the smaller it is. This means that you have to have some recent posts every month to maintain the PR of your profile.

[bird]

Please disable cookies in your browser, visit yahoo groups, and see for yourself how far you get. Not much use speculating before you have actually tried that, is there? ;)

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[BigDave]

I said:

Yahoo lets googlebot spider the publicly available areas of the yahoo groups.

Try setting your user agent to googlebot and spidering it without cookies.

Or even easier, just try this search and explain to me why those sites are in there.
[google.com...]

Not much use speculating before YOU have actually tried that, is there?

[bird]

Yes, there are indeed parts of the site that are spiderable, which includes the links pages of non-private groups. But then, nobody links to those links pages directly, which means they have minimal PageRank. And they tend to list many links, which spreads the effect even thinner. In that case I fully agree with you, that it's not worth the effort unless you're active in that group anyway, but it probably won't hurt.

The other thing is the message archives. I'm quite active in some groups myself, which has resulted in tons of signature links. Up to about a year ago, those had a noticeable effect on PageRank simply because of their large numbers. But I think it was around last spring when Yahoo started to require cookies to view messages, even for groups where the archive is publicly accessible. Your statement that "Everything you can see when you are not logged in will get spidered." is therefore a bit overly optimistic.

But the basic conclusion remains the same. If you think to artificially raise your PageRank through any kind of activity on the Yahoo groups: Don't waste your time.