The SEO-friendly social media site Sphinn may have been a little too friendly with submitters, something they addressed with a recent site change.
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.
