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Comment by jeremycolins | Hacker News Reader

Hey Matt, is there anything y'all can do about the content farm sites where someone buys an old high pr domain and sells 100's of links on it and drops them in between tons of content? Here's a prefect example of that: http://www.dcphpconference.com/.

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That is clearly webspam. We only indexed five pages from that site, but there's no reason for that site to show up at all. Thanks for mentioning it. It won't be in our index for much longer.

awesome. gosh that page is ranked 5! I still think google is best and trustworthy, but i also felt the problem of content farm in recent years as others. I run my site and find it troublesome that many spammy sites contact me to buy links. They absolutely have no interest in nofollow ads even with banner. They just want normal text links often with a given paragraph they specify mixed into my writing.

though, i do have a question about this ...sometimes i find 1 normal link (do-follow) on a page is approprate for my reader (e.g. the content match, and i approve the site), so in that situation i would like to sell link (and absolutely with a CLEAR "sponsored link" text in plain view but not with “rel="no-follow"”. Afaik google doesnt approve do-follow sold links in anyway. I find this a bit problem because good links from commerial activity could be just as appropriate that benefits my reader.

any advice, or perhaps furture plans, on this?

Hey Matt, thanks for the response. I actually have a huge list of these type of sites that I've submitted through the spam report and 90% of them are still indexed and have pagerank. Is there another way I can send them in?

Matt - I have a posterous site (which uses a subdomain of my main site) that I mostly use to index some of my favorite articles - same purpose as delicious but I can rest assured that the content will always be there. Since most of the site has dupe content, it may lose the PR (which I dont care for) but will that affect my primary site ranking.

I am not sure if Posterous offers the ability to add a robots.txt file with which I can tell search engines to exclude it, but would that prevent my primary site ranking from being affected?

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