I'm fairly inactive on IRC these days, so I'd probably prefer to keep talking here.
Okay, I'll divide this into two sections. The first will be mostly me just trying to respond to your points and arguments, and then I'll move on to concrete suggestions for solutions.
Responses
First of all, I'd like to note that you already tripped yourself up by trying to use "tf
es" in your post above. You ended up saying "I have no ill will towards you guys over at theflatearthsociety". I hope this can serve of anecdotal evidence of just how silly this solution is. It hurts the everyday user more than anyone else.
Secondly, you say there's a policy against "external sites". That policy doesn't seem to be documented anywhere (other than a single rage-fuelled post by yourself threatening to permaban anyone who does so little as mention tf
es.org, for which you apologised and which I believe you deleted). I know things are done a bit differently here than at tf
es, but I'm sure you understand why this strikes me as a bit odd, especially when only one site has seemingly been targeted.
Yes, there was a time some 2 years ago when our members spammed this forum with links. This was during the time when tensions were at an all-time high. You keep saying you want to put this behind us, and so do I, so why is that still a factor? If you feel that these posts still existing somewhere in the archives is a problem, clean them up (I'll happily offer my help in doing so in an expedited manner), but don't introduce arbitrary filters.
I monitor our site's Google rankings quite closely, and as a necessary side effect this also means I monitor yours. We only jumped up above you because your homepage vanished entirely from Google. Because it was dead for about a month. We had nothing to do with that.
I can no longer perform a count of tf
es.org links here (obviously - they've all been clobbered by the wordfilter), nor can I look through them to see what the content was exactly. However, BiJane's posts seem to make a good case for why it may be beneficial to include links to our Wiki, at least. The links to theflatearthsociety.org coming from our site seem to all be meaningful and intended as support for the posts' content.
Solutions
Okay, so you say your main reason for this is worrying about competition in SEO. I've played around with this stuff for the past couple years, admittedly starting with self-teaching through tfe
s.org, but at this point I'm involved with a few not-huge-but-not-insignificant-either websites. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm not clueless either. Let me begin by saying that no matter what you do, you will not affect our website's standing with Google in any meaningful way.
Google ignores websites which are too saturated with links to another website (or links in general). It also takes the website's reputation into account. A
recent Guardian article linking to our site is a thousand times as meaningful as turning this forum into a "link farm". Our little Google competition will largely be outside of your or my control (except for Rama's point - we can still compete for content).
So, what I'm trying to say up until now is that I'm not coming here asking you to revert the change because it will hurt our SEO. I'm here asking you to revert the change because it hurts Flat Earth.
Now, let's say that alone doesn't convince you, and you still want a technical solution to prevent search engines from following the links to our forum. You know me, I'm a bit of a stickler to Web specifications. Generally, the way to go about this stuff is to add a
rel="nofollow" to the link.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=enI'll make a little leap here and assume that you do actually care about "external sites" as you said, and that you're not deliberately targeting our site. If that is the case, that's an easy way of getting Google to ignore all links, truly preventing anyone and everyone from using this site for blackhat SEO in the future. If you're interested, all you'd have to do is edit 2 lines of code in /Sources/Subs.php. That way, the links will still work for normal users, but you will be leaving a clear message for bots that you do not wish for these sites to be indexed.
However, while this is the "least worst" of the solutions, it's still unnecessary. Search engine rankings are an enormous chain of interlocking factors. In particular, it's important to keep in mind that search engines are pretty good at detecting rogue SEO attempts and actually punish websites which don't play nice. For all we know, the links to t
es.org here might be penalising us, not rewarding. You might also be hurting yourself, since you've just introduced a large amount of broken links to your own domain (which often gets interpreted as "this site is outdated - why else would it contain broken links?"). This is seriously just not how SEO should be done.