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Matt Cutts will put a stop to this linking nonsense!
http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396
Here's several more you can add to the list:
http://www.jlh-design.com/2007/12/google-webmaster-helping-googlers/
thanks erik, I checked again and it only "apears" to trunctuate the URL when you go to edit it, however the actual feed is stored.
Now sphinn gets a nice link on my friendfeed page (the little orange rss image) on http://friendfeed.com/johnweb
Unfortunatly it doesn't look like the actual feeds have been updated in quite some time. bummer.
Not having seen as many spam submissions as you, I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine the real #1 signal of spam is that it's their first submission.
For us peons out here on the outside the #1 signal is no avatar.
So my question is, why can't the first submission of a newly registered user be moderated? If anything you are forcing the spammer to submit at least one actual article before they start their spamming ways. It would improve the quality of the stories shown, and since the hot topics page is showing items 5-6 days old, delaying the posting of a new members submission by a few hours or whatever it takes for mods to check it out won't impact the freshness of the hot stories by much.
Story: Microsoft Burns Book Search
I think it would the author three hours to tell you what was on 60-minutes last week.
I guess I missed the part where Matt says they "detected" anything. He does say, "notice". Which could mean a lot of things, spam reports, human review, heads up email, spot checking, etc.
It doesn't hurt that hot stories sit on the front page for up to six days now.
Have to agree with Donna, big sites get a lot of benefits even though they break the same guidelines, including partnerships: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-04-29-n56.html
I don't want to be contentious as it's your site and you can do whaterver you'd like with it, I just get defensive when it comes to using nofollow as a crutch for masking the real problems. It's just too easy to slap a nofollow on a site/page/link and not worry about it anymore, but that's another discussion. From reading Danny and evilgreenmonkeys responses this isn't a debate and the decision has been made.
From what I read here the implementation of nofollow on stories that don't go hot is much less about spam as the title may have suggested but more about not rewarding and thus inspiring weak submissions. Personally I don't see how one can even navigate to stories that are more than a few days old anyway, so I doubt they would be passing much link power at all and I still fail to make the connection between weak submissions just for the links, but hey if you've seen people talking about it somewhere it must be happening.
If I stipulate that some people are sphinning weak stories just for the link juice and the fact that it get's archived somewhere with a live link is encourging this behavior, then I think this plan brings in another potential problem. If the system only rewards the weak story with a live link for 48 hours then lets it go nofollow so it's no longer worth anything, are not the submitters going to notice that as well? Instead of being satisfied with knowing their story has a live link somewhere on page 50 of the navigation they will now change their behavior to resubmit further weak stories towards the end of that 48hr window?
A valid link is a link and just having a search engine crawl it is enough motivation to get it up there. Adding nofollow 48hrs later doesn't have an immediate affect on the link as #1) the link changes deep within navigation where crawl rate has to be much slower and #2) Search engines have a long memory and don't generally react to quickly #3) often discovery is the only motivation.
What I am saying is that by having the link followed for 48 hours is basically giving the weak submission exactly what they want AND giving them inspiration to continue to submit weak articles to get more of it.
I can't believe I am saying this as I am generally against sites that have blanket nofollow policies (wiki, lazy bloggers, unmoderated forums, etc.) but in the context of this stated mission of testing to see if adding nofollow reduces the noise I think you should consider nofollowing the links from the initial submission and THEN following only the hot links. I just think that if word gets out that sphinn links are good for 48 hours you will have an influx of people trying to keep their submissions fresh and within that 48 hour period.
Then again, it's not my site and my opinion doesn't really matter. If it were up to me any submission with the word "twitter" in it would be nofollowed, filtered, redirected to disney.com, and generally punished. j/k :) Good luck.
Uhh, Ok. I don't see this reducing the spammy or off topic submissions as I doubt they read the fine print when creating a throw away account or before firing up the spam bot.
To me it seems like you need to get people to actually report the spam that they see so that it hits the magic number of 3 submissions quicker and at least thrown into a holding pattern till a mod gets to look at it. One way would be to reward the spam submitters with a metric in their profile, in the greatest hits section, or wherever you think is good. You just have to watch sphinn live for a while to see that a lot of people do care about how many sphinns are by their name as they'll sphinn everything in sight, including the spam. Having a list of top spam catchers would get the same type of motivation working for removing the spam.
You then wouldn't have to punish the good stuff that doesn't go hot because they don't have 2000 twitter followers to pound it up to hot in 30 minutes after submission, but still rather reward on topic stuff while still keeping the spam off of the site completly.
If the spam cannot be controlled, then add the nofollow, bloggers do it everyday to their sites, but if you can control it, I don't think nofollow is the answer.
Sphunn for discussion, not concept.
Sounds good to me.
For the record I wasn't trying to say you were using nofollow as a crutch but rather trying to explain my position on the subject in general. Blame it on poor wording and lack of post editing on my part. I just wanted to make it clear that normally I don't recommend using nofollow when it can be avoided and since I knew the point of my comment was going go into the nofollow use I thought I'd preface the comment with my position.
I realize you and the team have setup a lot of mechanisms to fight the actual spam. I didn't realize that the threshold for mortals hitting the spam link was at 5 and not at 3 as advertised, this would explain a lot of stuff that tends to hang around longer than it should.
Nofollowing from the start makes more sense I was confused by "stories failing to reach the homepage (going "Hot") will get nofollow'd" which made it sound like the nofollow was added after the failure to go hot.
I think there may be some other motivation as just about everyone here has agreed that it should have no affect on the spam.
Getting people to actually hit the "report as spam" would help, I saw some today that was over 2 hours old, if it can't get 3-5 clicks or whatever figure the powers that be have come up with in two hours, something is wrong. If it takes a mod to remove it (which I didn't think was the case) then they should get some mods that are willing to pay more attention, I don't know what it takes to get within the vested circle but maybe some people who have time to admin the site should be given a chance.
It has been stated by Googlers many times, here's a couple:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/msg/2da344431bbc773d
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/answering-more-popular-picks-meta-tags.html
and then there is the lack of keywords mentioned in the metatags that Google does support:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812&query=meta&topic=&type=
Considering there is 4 day old stuff on the hot page maybe it would be a good idea to actually have stuff that is hot go on there....:)
Story: SEO Tips: What I’ve Done
"No, its just a matter of outgoing links from a page. No follow raises that as well as encourages spam, and as a result lowers your pagerank and search engine rankings"
Wow.
"We use to be owned by Google" is probably as effective in a meeting as "We are owned by Google" when a client is trying to decide between two firms. The inference is that they've got the inside track even without it being overtly said.
YES! It's been mentioned before, but I cannot agree more. Maybe even just add another tab to the Sphinn live page to follow despinns.
48 sphinns so far and not a single word on the post by a mod. Some community effort would be nice.
Story: Twitter Backlink Tip