Giveaway:

The giveaway up on the main page for the book, The Online Millionaire, will end soon. However, I am thinking of keeping it up and running each month so more people have a chance to win this book. So, keep your hat on and watch your mailbox each month.
Watch Your Forums:

Webmasters and SEO experts always try and watch a website’s Page Rank. Anytime it goes down, it causes a lot of stress as to how to get it back up again. Every single link that leaves a website must be monitored constantly. Links that leave a website take away points for Page Rank.

The one place many people may not be watching carefully are the forums. Watching my own forums, I have noticed types of spam that need to be monitored. Depending on the type of forum you have, this spam can hurt your Page Rank.

One type of spam : Members who sign up, fill in their profile, with a link to their own website and never post anything. They merely wanted a free link.

Another type of spam : Members who sign up and post a question right away. They will then visit a day or two later and post an answer to the question under a different username. The first post with the question or the second post with the answer will generally have a website url in it.

I take the username and/or the website url of the user that was posted in their profile or the forum area and research the search engines. If I find other forums, where the user has signed up, I check to see what type of posts they tend to make.

Forum Example:

I hid the url, but would be happy to share it if you email me.

I took the name out of the url and searched for it combined with the word forum.

For example: If the url is http://www.wendyshepherd.com I would take “wendyshepherd” (with no spaces) and search for the words wendyshepherd forum and look through the results.

Usually within the first 10-20 you will find other forums with the same url being used with two different users who registered a day or two apart and posted a question and answer where the url is mentioned.

These are link ‘leaks’ that I am sure many websites are not aware of. When you are watching your Page Rank and how you rank within the search engines, you want to be sure you plug any ‘leaks’. Remove them quickly.

One more thing, make sure that you do NOT allow “guest posting”. I hadn’t been monitoring one of my forums and went in to find the forum was out of control with spam. I mean, I had to delete everything and turn the forum off with a ‘maintenance’ sign to get the spam spiders to leave it alone.

Now I require every member who registers to be moderated. I check the usernames and urls in the search engines and watch the forums for spam. If you can’t do this yourself due to time constraints, I would recommend hiring someone to check the forums weekly or monthly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Business, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.