What's going on with the big forums ...?

Is there some sort of whispering that only those in the know are privy to?

I speak of course, about SEOChat changing all of their links to "no follow" and Webmasterworld blocking all search engine spiders, including Google and Yahoo?

Are the jungle drums quietly beating a secret rhythm about a forthcoming Search Engine apocalyptic algo change?

Thoughts ...?

 

haha. When you can, could you transmit some messages for me to that hot chick from down the street?

 

I guess the flu shot/mind control thing failed huh?

 

Yeah good luck with that. I'm wearing my aluminum helmet. Haha, foiled again.

 

People cried a bit when Sitepoint hid the siggys from the bots too. :waaah:

 

Brett Tabke may have gone a bit too far this time, Alexa has their traffic dropping precipitously. Without new blood from search engines WMW will just wither away. With all their weird TOS rules about naming specific sites, companies etc, the forum was already borderline when it comes to usefulness for many things.

Check this out:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.webmasterworld.com

 

It's no going to wither away, but yea I don't see how it got so popular with such stupid rules and unfriendly ui.

 

I don't mean completely gone, though that's not impossible--big forums/companies/sites have crashed and burned before...

I suspect he will look at the numbers and quickly get back into the big indexes so we'll never know what the long-term effect would have been but a loss of traffic like that could be a fatal blow if sustained over time. They have a certain overhead supported by that new traffic, it will be reindex or change or die.

 

It seems pretty rad to block the SE spiders entirely, although I believe the decision to do so was to do so at server level using .htaccess (I could be wrong about that part), in order to block unfriendly bots from sucking up all the bandwidth.

With seochat using the "no follow" attribute on all of the links, one has to wonder if perhaps they either know something we don't or if they have simply lost sight of their user base?

 

Yes, that was it exactly, there are several very long discussion threads about it there, most started by Brett. I haven't read them entirely, nor am I keeping up but it seems that many people want to download the entire forum for local reference in addition to the usual load we all put up with. It frustrates me as well that a part of my bandwidth bill (more than the price of a nice dinner) is eaten up by parasitic bots. But dropping out of the big indexes is probably cutting off the nose to spite the face. Brett admitted that he didn't expect to be out of Google quite that soon.

With as many non-existant pages of mine persisting in Google for months it does make me wonder if it were done manually... Certainly they do read WMW at Google.

It was internal politics from the looks of it, but I'd be nervous about lots of SEO OBL if they were on my site. OTOH it *is* an SEO forum with "SEO" in the title. It's something to speculate about whether you have inside knowledge or not...

 

Now I finally understand why I never saw my SitePoint posts appearing as backlinks in my sig..
Now I'll probably post much less there

 

all the big forums are making way for digitalpoint.

I am sure digitalpoint will be THE BIGGEST forum in 2006 and I'll come back to this post then

 

Surely that situation could be resolved by a type of 'reverse cloaking' that only allowed Google, MSN and Yahoo bots onto the site but excluded the rest?