Everyone knows Google devalued reciprocal links. And they have the largest database in the world, so all they have to do is issue a query to find recip links and stop them from flowing any PR juice. But for the more complex stuff, like triangular and the new way 10,000 way link exchange scheme, they might have to tweak their algo.

So who thinks Google reads this forum? We all know they index www.webmaster-talk.com regularly, so their spiders have a list of every link that's ever come up in the link exchange forum. And we know that using this place violates Google's terms of service and could result in a ban because

However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

My question is if Google uses forums like this one as a honey pot to collect data to test changes to their algorithms with?

Yes i m sure, they are also read this forum to improve their techniques.

I'd say no, but only because there are far more egregious spammer portals and places to hang out where Google can get reams of spammer information for free (Digital Pointless and V7N come immediately to mind).

Their time-to-reward ratio would be greater targeting those idiots than they would the relative few idiots that hang out here playing in the RLE forum.

I voted probably. It wouldn't surprise me that much if they did, but as Adam said, there are lots of spammer forums (Digital Pointless being a great example) on the web and this little backwater (if I can call it that) probably isn't of massive significance to them.

Update: Just noticed Adam said about Digital Pointless as well, but I've already written it now!

The thing is, Google prefers to do everything using weakly supervised methods and algorithms.

The crawlers already visit the forums several dozens times a day, and it would only take a dozen or so lines of code (if that) to extract all hrefs from any page located within a given URI.
Relative addresses and absolutes to the same URI or parent URI can easily be ignored or discarded and what you have left is a very nice set of seed data for another algorithm to examine those pages for unusual patterns

Hey presto, ~ 0 time taken and not a human being in sight (or on site )

Isn't automotion great?

Of course google indexes this and every other forum and thread here

i remember ages ago, someone was talking about google indexing and put a random word which wasnt in google at all, and after putting the word twice in the thread it was in google within 3 days.

Dan

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

And we know that using this place violates Google's terms of service and could result in a ban because

And really I think Google likely just degrades those links like many people have said. And honestly I haven't picked up many recirpocal links that generate substatial numbers of click throughs. Almost seems like you need a good gimick to get people to link to you without linking back.

[Rant]
Everybody talks about Google like Google is the king the internet. Like I care what Google thinks at all. Not really worth while to do any link building at all if all I was thinking about doing was spamming Google for free traffic. If Google had there way the only advertising on the internet would be AdSense.[/Rant]

You know they should add BB code for [rant] which like makes text red and italic, XD

I think it would be funny. But not seriously. No rant tags.

Why how many times have you seen on forums someone using [rant] syntax XD

Well that would be cool I suppose.

Maybe someone should post that in the suggestions forum.

Im so going to add a rant bb tag in the forums im admin on now

Hi,

Yes definately Google read this and index this forum.

But here one thing should be kept in mind that all forums sites uses
<a rel="nofollow"> tag which implies that weightage is not giving to any link, thesrfore it means that Google will definately read and index this page but the weightage is not given to any link that has been posted in the forum.

Kindly let me know wat are your suggestions.

Thanks
Angel

I would rather be interested if Google uses algorithms that check how often the word "link exchange", "link swap" and of this kind near your links and wether Goolge devaluates such links. We may start another poll.

Yes,

Definately Google loves Forum Sites and Index each and every pages. I marked evry Forum sites also use rel= "no follow" Attribute. But Google spider can not crawl this tag throughly.

ook...

google indexes forum links. do a link: search to a site of just about any user and you will find a link from there www button or there signature. Not that those links count for anything except acting as a business card or as porfolio refference.

Thanks,

Buck

Originally Posted by Angel_SEO

Hi,

Yes definately Google read this and index this forum.

But here one thing should be kept in mind that all forums sites uses
<a rel="nofollow"> tag which implies that weightage is not giving to any link, thesrfore it means that Google will definately read and index this page but the weightage is not given to any link that has been posted in the forum.

Kindly let me know wat are your suggestions.

Thanks
Angel

I really can't figure out what Google wants from poor webmasters making a couple of bucks from their websites. I would say Google is greedy and just wants to hoard all the money itself and be the supreme ruler of the internet unaccountable for its actions. Why doesn't Google start a crack down on big multi-billion businesses and lower their PRs? For heavens sake Google, stop this. Live and let live!

Well for a start PR is useless for anything other than entertainment value.

Google wants nothing from webmasters, their priorities are to their users (J.Q. Public) and their advertisers.

It possably does but there are a lot of sites out there that are superb but not ranked correctly.