Placing a link in Sphinn's list of upcoming topics, where others may vote it up for promotion or down to be ignored, became something of a safe haven for aggressive spammers.
Those links picked up valuable 'link juice' immediately, passing the page rank of Sphinn along to the destination, whether it deserved such a merit or not. Spamming and its consequences caught up Edward Lewis of PageOneResults; his lengthy interaction with spam on Sphinn led to his banning from Sphinn and a lengthy account of the issue.
Sphinn looks like it's ready to move on from this minor tempest. Gab Goldenberg noted, on Sphinn, how the site began adding nofollows to outbound links from upcoming stories.
Rob Kerry noted in another Sphinn thread how the site's organizers arrived at the decision to make this change:
The topic of nofollow'ing submissions in What's New was discussed at the beginning of June during a Third Door Media meeting. After discussion with our moderators, we decided to roll out nofollow attributes within this section of the site for the last update release. I sometimes see some good posts just miss the "Hot" requirements despite deserving traffic and a direct link, so we may also trial allowing posts with X number of Sphinns to have nofollow removed in future.
A topic that catches the eye of the community, and its corresponding votes, loses the nofollow attribute with its promotion. That serves as a reward for better than average content creators, who benefit from the increased reputation with the search engines.
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Comments
Hey Kimberly, You seem to be
Hey Kimberly,
You seem to be one of the main reasons for Sphinn going for nofollow links.. lol. i was kidding
Sphinn is spinning out of control
I hate spam blogs but I do not think we all should be punished.
Spinn will go the same route as Pingoat and I no longer will use the service.
But Pingoat actually calls the Google cops and reports spamblogs. IN some degree that is a great idea, but they become judge and juror which is not always the best.
I have yet to find out the true definition of a spam blog. Is it up to anyone's interpretation?
spun out
Searchles.com pr 6 dofollow is where it is at
Those elitist sites will just have the same 10-20 submitting like they do now.
My blog is dofollow
Peace
shooting themselves in the foots
Sphinn isn't so big that it cna't be monitored and I think that going nofollow only paints them as the type of people who aren't willing to work for us as their customer base. Going nofollow free in my blog network has increased spam comments, but not by a huge percentage. All that is required is someone reading checking submissions. This also doesn't have to be a paid employee, trusted members would me more than happy to do it for homepage links. Hell I would read a few thousand a day for that sort of link juice.
All I can say about this move personally is I won't take down my sphinn buttons, but I won't be actively encouraging people to use their service either. If someone likes the story enough to submit it, great. If not even a front page ranking from them only draws a fraction of what I can get with mediocre digg or reddit votes. I can also say that I am prepared to go nofollow free when we get out fot he trial phase for my pligg based ratings site mysizl.com
BTW really great posts today. I couldn't believe how many I found I had something to say on...
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