[rackforms]

Yuuuuuuup lol, under penalty for almost a decade now.

In my case I had a forum (remember those!) in support of my software product.

Bots would occasionally create accounts and post links to knockoff handbags and watches. I'd tolerate (and swiftly kill!) them because our users really loved having a place to meet. (This was back in 2011, ironically, reCAPCTAHA landed in 2012)

Unbeknownst to me those links were part of a larger spam network where thousands of low-quality links pointed back to my site, presumably to those fake accounts(?).

When the penalty hit the process of trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and trying to do something about it -- identical.

In short, I've been penalized out of existence because of an obvious and in my humble opinion, easy to identify spam campaign. Sadly Google placed the cleanup burden on me, and try as I did nothing actually helped. The article's mention "hidden" penalties feels...accurate.

I often tell folks when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve. My site and goodness knows how many others have been placed so far below the fold that if we're not outright killed, we never reach the users and potential we should.

No biggie if the search market were more diverse, sadly, that is simply not the world we live in.

[WarOnPrivacy]

>when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve.

This may be the most relevant synopsis of Google search, that has ever been crafted.

[Grimm1]

Amen.

[autoexec]

I can see how that sucked for you, but personally, I don't want google sending me to forums infested with spam bots. I don't agree with google's hidden penalties, I think transparency is crucial, but the burden of cleaning up your spam filed website was yours and I'd expect every search engine to bury you until you managed to get it under control.

[perryizgr8]

> you managed to get it under control.

He did, though. He cleaned up his website and deleted all the spam comments. How do you expect him to prevent other websites from linking to his?

[shalmanese]

Via Google's link disavowal tool.

[rackforms]

Great feedback but yeah, big picture we're talking pretty small numbers.

The 10 (or so) spam accounts posted about 30 times. The longest lasting survived a weekend, after which I enabled manual account activation. From start to finish the spam issue lasted around 3 weeks. Eventually, I got rid of the forum altogether.

Alas I tried all the usual things, from the disavow tool to Webmaster forums and dozens of site changes, sadly nothing helped. My penalty felt back then and still appears to be, permanent.

It may help to know pre-penalty my rank was quite high, first page for most relevant search terms. (immediately after page 20 or lower, now around page 10).

Ironically, while the rank was nice to have I never actually did anything for it.

I simply built a fast, human first(!), site that inadvertently followed Google's site quality guidelines.

For example, my software generates web forms. One common growth tactic my competitors use is placing a link at the bottom of every form back to the parent site.

Me -- I never did that. I strongly felt that under no circumstance should the output of my software be used as a marketing tool. Sure it may harm growth, but it felt right, and that was enough for me.

Years after my penalty I read just that. Google frowns upon and may penalize sites for using such "widely distributed site links".

My focus was and always has been on user, so of course I'm the one who gets penalized lol.

Anyway, I think the most damning part of the process was not having a reasonable path for knowing what exactly happened and what I could do to help.

If I were crafting legislation that's where I'd start. I can't help that Google has the market-share it does, but it does mean we all have to play within their world.

All I ask is the rules, wherever they are, are fairly, justly, and evenly applied.

[donmcronald]

Hey. I don't know much about SEO and have a question. Does sub-domain (forum.example.com) vs sub-path (example.com/forum) make a difference? Now days would it be better to isolate anything with user generated content onto a completely separate domain (example.net)?

[im3w1l]

Did you make your outbound links in forum post nofollow? That should remove the incentive to use your forum in spam networks.

[warpspin]

This does not work. Many spammers are not exactly the most clever folks and often neither check the effectiveness of their links, nor if they are removed within a few hours anyway. Instead they simply send automated tools to your site, which they often do not even create themselves.

In addition to that, there are a couple of reasons more, why spammers sometimes even actively chase nofollow links. For one, many people believe a certain amount of nofollow links is part of a "healthy" link profile: having 99% follow links might be considered a "bad signal" by Google, because nofollow is just so common, you are expected to have many nofollow links.

I will not judge this theory, but the theory does exist and is followed by some people.

Plus, the fact that it seems Google simply started considering nofollow as a kind of hint, not a decision, did not help the spam situation either.

Regarding whether the nofollow helps with at least avoiding the penalty, even if you are still spammed, nobody knows whether this might work. Google is usually uptight about what it does or does not do.

[account42]

> Plus, the fact that it seems Google simply started considering nofollow as a kind of hint, not a decision, did not help the spam situation either.

When nofollow is used for all user generated content they kind of have to take it as no more than a suggestion. Just ignoring UGC when it comes to ranking would throw away too much of the web.

[onion2k]

This suggests spammers care about the quality of the links their bots post rather than the quantity. I suspect that isn't the case. Spam is always worthwhile to post because forum might change to remove the nofollow in future, a forum user might follow a link, and it's not worth the effort bothering to check if a forum is providing 'value' to the network. In other words, it's easier to to spam everyone and hope some of it proves useful.

[girvo]

I think they meant specifically in the context of avoiding being penalised by Google; my admittedly lay understanding is that "nofollow" would've helped here -- the spammers would still spam of course, but the penalty would not be as severe? Or apply at all, perhaps? Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding though