Reducing SEO/advertising spam on Bitcointalk

[ABCbits]

Following thread Advertising and shilling on Bitcointalk and seeing SEO spam almost everyday, i'm wondering if there are ways to reduce SEO/advertising on Bitcointalk. After digging my memory and very short research, i would like to propose few ideas that could reduce SEO/advertising spam on Bitcointalk.

1. Disallow brand new and newbie rank from using URL tag

Most user don't bother copy/paste URL manually, so traffic from this forum could be significantly reduced. While it annoy some people, it also reducing risks where user open URL spontaneously.

2. Use norefferer or nofollow tag

- According to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/112080, Wikipedia used nofollow tag to remove incentive to spam Wikipedia with "link spam" and could be used to reduce SEO spam.
- While norefferer have no effect on SEO, it'll be more difficult to know whether spamming on Bitcointalk has "positive" result, especially if they spam on many websites.
- Those tags could should be added to URL only on posts, whether for all user or specific rank (e.g. Brand New, Newbie and Jr. Member).

Any feedback is appreciated, especially if you have experience with SEO.

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[BlackHatCoiner]

What's the point of disallowing the URL tag from newbies if there's no reason for the spammers to use it? The former just harms the honest users if the latter is actualized. For that reason, I'll just support the second suggestion.

I'm also surprised this hasn't been thought by anyone for so long. I mean this place keeps getting shilled, do you look in your emails? I must receive the new deliverer tokens once a day as I follow the Bitcoin Discussion board and bunch of others.

[ABCbits]

What's the point of disallowing the URL tag from newbies if there's no reason for the spammers to use it? The former just harms the honest users if the latter is actualized.

AFAIK nofollow tag only affect SEO, so dissallow URL on newbie rank is needed if we want to reduce traffic to link shared by spammer.

[NeuroticFish]

- According to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/112080, Wikipedia used nofollow tag to remove incentive to spam Wikipedia with "link spam" and could be used to reduce SEO spam.

My first reaction was: this would be awesome!
But it may be necessary to be implemented only in the post, not signatures and paid ads.
And then.. something else came into my mind: the huge amount of crypto projects announcing themselves here. I know that many are worthless or scam, but if they will not be "rewarded" to be here, they may post their announcements in another forums. And then many (yeah, altcoiners and bounty hunters) will follow. And I guess that this can be a problem.

So, all in all, this may need a second thought.

- While norefferer have no effect on SEO, it'll be more difficult to know whether spamming on Bitcointalk has "positive" result, especially if they spam on many websites.

While nofollow can get to results, this may do more harm than help.


Doing this only for certain ranks won't help much. We can get to the point copper membership can become a "license to spam", instead of just announcing own project.

[NeuroticFish]

I will start with something I should have been writing in the first reply: I am not a SEO specialist. I am using my intuition/common sense in the answers, not actual experience.

While nofollow can get to results, this may do more harm than help.

Can you elaborate about the harm?

It's more a bad choice of words.
You wrote that with noreferrer the website won't know if the lead came from bitcointalk. And then the projects - especially ANN because there one should not put ref links - will have difficulties into quantifying whether bitcointalk helps them or not. Even more, many will not understand this and just consider that bitcointalk is no good, hence doesn't worth attention from the new crypto projects. (This last part was what I thought as harm -> crypto projects no longer coming).

Doesn't user who perform SEO spam banned quickly? If so, there's no reason for SEO spammer to buy copper membership.

I don't know, it depends on how blatant the spam is. Just think on how long it took until coinidol spam was cleared. And, from what I see, that account is not banned.
But maybe I'm wrong. You know, a second thought is necessary also on what I write

[Quickseller]

Following thread Advertising and shilling on Bitcointalk and seeing SEO spam almost everyday, i'm wondering if there are ways to reduce SEO/advertising on Bitcointalk. After digging my memory and very short research, i would like to propose few ideas that could reduce SEO/advertising spam on Bitcointalk.

1. Disallow brand new and newbie rank from using URL tag

Most user don't bother copy/paste URL manually, so traffic from this forum could be significantly reduced. While it annoy some people, it also reducing risks where user open URL spontaneously.

2. Use norefferer or nofollow tag

- According to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/112080, Wikipedia used nofollow tag to remove incentive to spam Wikipedia with "link spam" and could be used to reduce SEO spam.
- While norefferer have no effect on SEO, it'll be more difficult to know whether spamming on Bitcointalk has "positive" result, especially if they spam on many websites.
- Those tags could should be added to URL only on posts, whether for all user or specific rank (e.g. Brand New, Newbie and Jr. Member).

Implementing adding tags to certain URLs could be done in a similar way that restrictions on newbie's ability to post pictures is implemented.

Backlink spam is not terribly rampant, in part because there are automated tools in place to quickly delete posts with spammy URLs. One point mentioned on your stackexchange article is that the tags are effectively "stiffing" their sources of Wikipedia's credibility, even though Wikipedia incrementally gained its own credibility from each of its sources.

The same might be said for implementing nofollow tags for URLs posted by newbies. For example, if a newbie posts a link that is appropriate to be posted in the forum, and others find it interesting enough to talk about, that URL will not get credit for being posted on bitcointalk for as long as that person is a newbie (and as long as google does not reindex the thread after the user is promoted).

If newbies' links have the nofollow tag, it would encourage spammers to using higher ranked accounts for their spam. This is a problem for the administration because the decision to remove a post from a higher ranked account is more difficult than remove a post from a newbie. Ditto with banning higher ranked users. For example, there are automated tools in place to nuke newbies, but not to even remove posts by junior member accounts. Under the status quo, spammers links are unlikely to get noticed by google because they are present for such a short period of time, however if spammers start using higher ranked accounts, each link will have a higher probability of successfully being noticed by google.

[LeGaulois]

You have a misconception of the nofollow tag and contrary to what you think, google gives credit to this type of link. Moreover, they can be more valuable than a do-follow link. Secondly, spammers also need no-follow links to add diversity to their "profile links".
Only do-follow links can be suspicious for google

By enforcing “nofollow” tags, it tells the search engines that these links are worthless when it comes to considering their value to the linked site. This means the incentive to fill Wikipedia with link-spam is basically eliminated.

it's not true, the tag tells to google to not follow the link. Google algorithm may or not respect it
Following this logic means all the links given by Wikipedia are worthless, so Wikipedia itself is worthless since it gives only worthless sources

Under the status quo, spammers links are unlikely to get noticed by google because they are present for such a short period of time,

if the links are here for 1 or 2 hours, it can be enough. Spammers sometimes just want to get their URLs indexed and forums are good for this (and because the link is deleted it doesn't mean Google will do the same in its database)

[KingsDen]

1. Disallow brand new and newbie rank from using URL tag

In the forum we have genuine newbies who are good, who are always affected by any introduction that restricts newbies. While the good newbies would be limited and end up being discouraged, the notorious spammers would always have a way to maneuver the restrictions.
Apart from the restrictions on images, @Theymos admitted that he is not willing to introduce anything that would limit newbies.

The things on the forum which encourage spam are allowed mainly because it's part of the forum's mission to be as free as possible. Eg. banning bounties would undoubtedly reduce spam, but that'd be destroying an entire economy/population/culture which has been able to develop due to the forum's freedom. I am willing to take this sort of action, but only as an absolute last resort. It's always preferable to handle these problems by reshaping the environment to make them non-problems, rather than removing some freedom.

It's wonderful when someone is able to constructively do something on the forum instead of continuing with whatever they were expected to do under the status quo. Enabling that sort of thing is exactly why Bitcoin and this forum were created. Though bitcointalk.org is not a worldwide welfare organization, and people are not entitled to make money.

Limiting newbie participation is very harmful for a community. Newbie jail will never return: I consider the newbie-jail period to have been extremely damaging to the forum. When barriers to participation are too high, then the best people often just won't go to the trouble of joining, and the people who are willing to jump through the hoops are often people who aren't good for the community: people with nothing better to do, scammers, get-rick-quickers, etc. Having a permanent newbie jail policy would improve things a lot in the short-term, but would end up being a fatal poison to the community.

[Quickseller]

Under the status quo, spammers links are unlikely to get noticed by google because they are present for such a short period of time,

if the links are here for 1 or 2 hours, it can be enough. Spammers sometimes just want to get their URLs indexed and forums are good for this (and because the link is deleted it doesn't mean Google will do the same in its database)

Like I mentioned, automated tools are being used to quickly delete some spammy links by newbies. So a lot of the spam is deleted before anyone even has a chance to read the post. In my experience, reports about spammy links are handled quickly, and it is unusual to find a post to report that is very old.