Just for the record, there's now a robots.txt file blocking access to parts of this forum by search engine spiders - especially Google.
The reason is twofold:
1/ I wanted to ensure that duplicated content is ignored, so that search engines would pay most attention to the most relevant source of content - ie, the main threads, rather than variations of them (the HTML arhive, the printer friendly versions, the hybrid versions, etc).
2/ The second is that for quite a few weeks now I've observed porn webmasters joining the membership - just because Google would normally index their profile page, and thus add a backlink to their site.
In other words: this forum was being secretly manipulated to promote porn sites elsewhere on the net. Except that it wasn't being done very secretly - sincere thanks to our SuperModerator, brucegdc, who first alerted me to this issue.
All such offenders had their links removed and then were banned. I watched more just to see how rampant the problem was, and see it in action over time.
There is now a block on the member list, so any such practice of this in future will *not* benefit the porn webmasters in the slightest.
If anyone's interested, I've written a short article about this phenomenon, and termed it "silent spamming":
http://www.britecorp.co.uk/articles/webmaster-resources/warning-website/silent-spamming.php
The reason is twofold:
1/ I wanted to ensure that duplicated content is ignored, so that search engines would pay most attention to the most relevant source of content - ie, the main threads, rather than variations of them (the HTML arhive, the printer friendly versions, the hybrid versions, etc).
2/ The second is that for quite a few weeks now I've observed porn webmasters joining the membership - just because Google would normally index their profile page, and thus add a backlink to their site.
In other words: this forum was being secretly manipulated to promote porn sites elsewhere on the net. Except that it wasn't being done very secretly - sincere thanks to our SuperModerator, brucegdc, who first alerted me to this issue.
All such offenders had their links removed and then were banned. I watched more just to see how rampant the problem was, and see it in action over time.
There is now a block on the member list, so any such practice of this in future will *not* benefit the porn webmasters in the slightest.
If anyone's interested, I've written a short article about this phenomenon, and termed it "silent spamming":
http://www.britecorp.co.uk/articles/webmaster-resources/warning-website/silent-spamming.php