Forum Moderators: phranque
It turned out that my URL had been posted in a number of guestbooks--seemingly at random, because the sites had nothing to do with my topic--and the accompanying e-mail addresses were fictitious addresses at my domain (addresses like "2@domain.com," "28@domain.com," and "oop@domain.com").
Has anyone else run into this problem? I'm wondering if it was an act of "spamdalism" directed at me, or if there's an automated program that grabs Web URLs at random and spams guestbooks with them.
Very well could be a competitor of yours that wants your site to get penalized. Google has been giving guestbooks a PR0, which means that you would have a number of PR0 links pointing to your site, which isn't good.
Another member here encountered this same problem during the last update, and the end result was a serious drop in ranking and penalization.
Sorry to hear it. You should contact the webmaster of the guestbook website and explain your situation.
If Google rates guestbooks and forums and profiles with a PR of 0, your links to your site just get no credit (in pagerank and most probably in anchortext value).
I've asked Webmasters to delete the guestbook entries that I know about, but of course there may be many guestbook entries that I'm not aware of because (a) the guestbook software didn't send automated "Thank you" notices, or (b) the Webmasters didn't send me nasty notes about spamming.
For what it's worth, I did get the poster's IP address, and I've reported the incident to the offender's ISP.
