How It Goes
Well, some good news on my other site–the one with the forums that some of you are “pioneers” (i.e., beta testers) on.
It’s doing fairly well in the search engines.
And that is something I expected and hoped for.
Of course, it has negatives as well, and that is one reason I have made it a bit more complex to get an account on than your typical forum.
You see, a lot of people like to build what are referred to as “backlinks” to their sites. The more backlinks, the better, presumably. Google, for example, uses the number of incoming backlinks as well as the value of the site containing the backlink in ranking a site. So, if a high-ranking site links to your site, that’s considered good.
So, some of these people will do whatever they can to get those backlinks. As a blogger, you’ll typically see this in the form of comment spam. You’ll have people with keywords as their names, and they’ll make some generic comment on your blog, and have a link to their website. That’s a backlink. If you’re like me, most of those get deleted or blocked by something like Akismet.
Well, the same thing happens on forums. And it happens on any site where you might have a profile that can be seen by the public and search engines.
So, there are profile spammers. What they do is look for high-ranking sites that have offer their users public profiles, and they’ll go in, register on the site, put up their links and move on to the next site.
Which, of course, clutters the site with a bunch of useless profiles of people that don’t use the site, don’t participate in the community and never had any intention of doing so. So, that means the webmaster needs to go in a purge those profiles.
So, I am endeavoring to try to keep those spammers out. And, that’s why I’ve made it a bit difficult to obtain an account on my system, using a manual approval process rather than an automated system. They’ll probably still try to set up accounts, but there should be fewer than there otherwise would have been, so it should result in a reduced workload from what I would otherwise have had.
Also, for those of you who are “pioneers,” you should be reading between the lines here. As you may recall, you have the option of having your profile private (viewable only by logged in users) or public (viewable by everyone… and search engines). If your profile, for example, contains something like a link to your blog, you might want to consider making your profile public because i’ll be a little bit of extra link juice to your blog, which could help your search engine rankings, which could help you get more readers.
And, you know, right now it’s free, so you may wish to take advantage of that.
spammer comments drive me batshitcrazy on my blog. Thankfully Disqus blocks most of them for me so I dont have to deal with deleting them manually.