Re:Ask YC: Can we have a report spam button?
by ericb on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @02:14PM
(#135347)
Marking links as spam has 3 advantages that I can see.
1-You can remove the links so they get no more incidental traffic from people viewing the new-queue.
2-If you remove the link entirely, it removes the SEO benefit of an inbound link. I would also recommend setting rel=nofollow on all links in the new queue regardless, to remove the pagerank benefit for SEO.
3-If a spam link is a separate "veto" then a spammer creating dummy users to vote threads up doesn't work, as real users can veto the post.
Edit: In thinking about it, approaches 1 and 2 can apply to low-point items without a new spam feature, however, hiding spam sooner reduces the incentive to submit spam. Theoretically, editors work fine, but that seems like a lot of manual labor.
1-You can remove the links so they get no more incidental traffic from people viewing the new-queue.
2-If you remove the link entirely, it removes the SEO benefit of an inbound link. I would also recommend setting rel=nofollow on all links in the new queue regardless, to remove the pagerank benefit for SEO.
3-If a spam link is a separate "veto" then a spammer creating dummy users to vote threads up doesn't work, as real users can veto the post.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
Edit: In thinking about it, approaches 1 and 2 can apply to low-point items without a new spam feature, however, hiding spam sooner reduces the incentive to submit spam. Theoretically, editors work fine, but that seems like a lot of manual labor.