Fri 27 Nov 2009
NME.com
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)I love the NME (New Musical Express) – it’s the only bit of rainforest I actually buy these days.
But what a waste of 184,089 threads and 2,173,238 posts in their online forum…
and I don’t really think of NME as where to buy viagra.
As a result of poor moderation, “buy viagra” and all other kinds of spam, Google has nuked it’s forum.
- No Pagerank.
- No threads in Google.
- No traffic from Google.
At least to this part of the site.
You can see the reason why, using Yahoo, who will index anything:
Clean those viagra sales pages up (and anything else in there), ask Google for a reinclusion request, and watch NME traffic go up by 90% lol.
Hang on. Viagra Jelly, Free shipping to the UK, same day delivery, and free comparison on viagra, cialis, and levitra?
Might be some good viagra deals in there after all… 
On a serious note – this is a good example of Google nuking a particular part of even a trusted site for poor moderation and spamming. Effectively, www.nme.com/boards/ is a bad neighbourhood.
For the rest of us small fry, Google just takes your entire site out if you let this sort of, for instance, “buy viagra spam”, go on.
I’ve seen this on NME for ages, and seen it talked about before, but I thought it was timely to check what was happening after that vague spam advice from Google yesterday.
NME.com SEO
I don’t usually talk about other sites in detail in public, but while you are at cleaning up that viagra spam NME, you might want to do a bit of basic SEO on the site and at least remove default meta stuff.
Need help? No probs.
PS – It’s not just the NME that has issues – check out Mashable & News Sites Spam.
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
The ubiquitous “buy viagra” seo post. Don’t hate me
Incredible that NME not only allowed this to happen but to flourish and persist to the extent that Google takes notice and takes steps. I guess if you have a lot of posts already and didn’t have moderation on it will be almost like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Makes we wonder myself with 250,000 pages if I should be doing spot checks. hmmmm
And for the first time since my email subscription to your blog, your post went into spam (“Mail thinks this is junk mail”)
It’s interesting that Viagra is now automatically associated with a bad neighbourhood. I mean – what if I were an ethical, non-spamming, Viagra salesperson ……… would you let me advertise on your site? If not why not?
Another informative and amusing post! Shows that even the big boys can get hit!
Interesting point from Nick – maybe you could try setting up a Viagra site and see if Google cans it. Surely they can’t be so ageist
The jelly doesn’t work and thats all I’m saying
@Dom Ha ha
As usual people who want to get comment links by all means using totally irrelevant comments will keep posting
them as everyone knows Only the website that provides such outgoing links gets penalised if action is taken. The reason being that you can only control outgoing links from your website and not incoming links.
Awesome – great legitimate use of one of the spammiezt terms on the Internet. A clear lesson in how non moderation just isn’t an option.
They’re running a vBulletin version that’s about 18 months out of date too, so any moderation they can do is going to get very quickly undone, plus it doesn’t have a lot of the mass modding tools in later versions.
So it looks like they’ve got few/poor mods, not got great tools and massive “user base” – yeah, that’ll work out…
Very nice example of a part of a site hit for spam rather than the whole thing. Kudos.
amusing post, reminds me of a client which I went throught it’s “viagra” crippled pages at ask for a reinclusion not a long time ago. Not seing is site on Google made the client really helpull and fast… haha!
keep having fun with viagra
Working on NME would be a corker – would pay them to work on a site like that! OK, maybe not, but it would be a great one to get involved in!
Cool find Shaun.
Ben
Nice find. But you sold yourself short with the headline. “Google Nukes NME Message Boards” would’ve been catchier.
Ha ha Matt I was thinking of getting Lyndon to do my headlines (mentioned it to him some time ago) but alas I thought “At last! An excuse to get Buy Viagra in my headlines” lol.
I ‘m amazed at the quantity of spam on the site. I just clicked on one of the viagra links and it was posted by a user with 8K of posts, probably all viagra posts.
Good find keep it up
[...] Buy Viagra At NME.com – not to lose the ‘fun’ theme, we also had Shaun over at Hobo whom was looking at a site (forum) that was nuked by Google, for all things… Viagra-spam! Who knew? The interesting part is that not the entire site was nuked; just the boards. [...]