Guestbook Link spams and how to prevent them?

Today, quality Link building is crucial for gaining Link popularity with the search engines. It is also to score higher page ranks for web pages to score higher page ranks with the search engines. Amongst many other methods to obtain free links for your site, is the technique of signing in with various Guestbooks.

Many sites these days carry a section of “Guestbooks” in them, with an option of signing in. and this is from where, the Link seekers get the source to build free links, in abundance. Using hundreds of such guestbooks, anyone can create links pointing back to their sites.

But it would be stupid to think that just signing guestbooks and adding hundred links can improve a site's link popularity score at the search engines. This is because, there is no guarantee that the links pointing back at your site from the various guestbooks carry equal weightage, or even any weightage or not! These guestbook links could be valid or invalid, genuine or penalized and related or irrelevant to your site theme.

Guestbook links are just like (Free for All) links and therefore carry less significance with the search engines. One of the main reasons for this is also the fact, that with the guestbooks, links can be obtained by anyone, without any human intervention or moderators, to keep a check on the content of the sites linking to these guestbooks. This makes such links ineffective and worthless.

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With such links carrying less or no credibility at all, it is difficult to say whether search engines consider such free links a reason to measure link popularity or not. And with the modern search engine tracking software, it is now very easy for them to track the keyword “guestbook” in the URL string, and ignore any links appearing from those URL's.

But if you do want to integrate a Guestbook in your site, and also prevent it from link spamming, here are a few ways to go about managing a Guestbook in the right way:

• Opt for moderated Guestbook software, which can enable you to manually approve each post or link being sent to your site.

• Spammers opt for frequent postings, repetitively, giving a space time of less than 3 seconds between each post. Several guestbook software these days, come with a facility that lets you block repetitive posting and reject fast posting

• You can also opt for the facility block posts which contain links, as this will let only those visitors to post, those who are interested in your website, and not those, which visit your site with the only purpose of link building.

• There are a few selected spam keywords like names of prescription drugs etc. which can be traced for some time, and all the posts which contain such spam keywords can be blocked.

• By opting for Guestbook softwares like Dreambook, Carbonize and spinoff, you are enabled to centrally remove spamming, as most of them also offer moderated guestbooks.

• If you do not want the search engine crawlers to follow any of the links being provided in your guestbook posts, then you can opt for Guestbook software which include rel="nofollow", in both, the URL field and the hyperlinked URL's in the posts.

You can also keep a check, trace and block the common IP addresses which have been spamming your Guestbook.