"Taking Advantage of a Good Thing" - AR Community Guidelines Re-Visited

Hi Rich... thank you for setting high standards for content quality.  We all benefit from the strength that good content builds for A|R and it's members and your efforts to keep raising the bar in that way challenges us all to achieve more for ourselves and our A|R colleagues.  I am sure that all the agents contributing quality content in Jonesville are especially appreciative!

Hi Rich, I have seen this type of thing on personal websites as well.  Its definitely in poor taste and speaks volumes.  I believe its important to stick with relevant up-to-date information and write in a useful way with the intent to share knowledge.  Keyword stuffing is pretty obvious to all.

Thanks for the excellent post:)

Rich, The big problem I see are the people who haven't contributed much to ActiveRain in the form of good content just coming in and using the Google Juice of ActiveRain to their selfish advantage.  The opportunity to come in and create posts with self-serving outbound links to their other sites is just too big of a temptation.  It's not fair to the long time members who have contributed quality content. 

Here's my suggestion.  Hopefully some technical genius can work out the details.   I would have a probationary period for members before any outbound links from their blogs carry any Google value.  Maybe after their first 50 posts, their blog would be reviewed. If they seemed to have created some good stuff, then the reward would be that the links in their blog would be turned on as far as Google is concerned. 

Reward the behavior you desire, and you'll get more of it.  But if you give out unearned rewards to everyone, you'll have a mess and it will drive away the people who you actually want to keep around.

The free links is just one part of the problem that creates junk content.  The other thing that creates junk content is the points system.  It was a great tool to get ActiveRain to where it is but in my opinion, it is degrading the overall content.

I actually like Tim's idea - but it would be a killer to implement...how many  new members join every day?  How would that be moderated?

Of course if they were unable to just start a "link farm" blog, so to speak - the overall membership numbers would drop but the quality of the members might be higher.

Theoretically...

Rich - on a total off topic side note:  I love your banner picture above.

I never heard of "black hat techniques" until today.  I have stumbled upon post like your example and also thought that the blogger had done it for points only and then I moved on to other blogs.  I am glad that the Ative Rain developers are watching this.  They are helping to ensure that this site is continually used to give valuable information and not just to get the blogger "presence" on the internet.  Great Work!!

Black hat techniques..... hhmmm....

Rich,

Is crazy that people do that.  I dont even see what the benefit is.  Some of us have no idea what all the tricks are, but even if it does show up, wont consumers see the crappy post anyway ?  We just work hard and try to provide excellent content and have confidence that the google engines will take care of themselves !

Rich, whether it be a website or a blog content is king!!  This is just a suggestion but I think you should re-blog your series of articles ever so often.  Someone else may have mentioned doing this as I did not read all 73 comments to find out. 

Rich, I have forgotten about the black hat techniques. Thanks for the guidelines. I stumbled upon the previous guidelines the other day, and wondered where I had been. It's a good thing that I had tried to follow good etiquette.  I also post market reports. I feel that market reports should be more of an analysis of market trends, review of overall housing inventory and local real estate climate such as zoning changes, or major new developments that may impact a neighborhood, etc.  A mere posting or extract of MLS listings, like the example in your post is rather redundant since consumers could obtain easily these from most websites with IDX features. Let's keep AR rich in quality content.

Unbelievable. Another thing that I'm quite surprised at is that there is a member who is slandering another member and despite multiple contacts to AR to have him removed (as in the guidelines it says that is not permitted), his profile is still active. I love AR, but I'm disappointed in the way they are handling this situation. Especially for all of us that work so hard at following the rules.

Your write, the point is to be creative and if you cant think of anything original then do not bother to  post.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and I do post market reports, however I write about the area, and trends that we are seeing.

Thanks for the information.

Rich with so many new members your post will provide needed guidance.

Rich, I've enjoyed this series very much.  So much information.  I've seen those kinds of posts and I just don't understand (aside from the points) why they are posted. 

Gotcha, is stuffing like something that goes with a turkey?  AR turkey, hum, a new phrase.

You will have a stampede of folks signing up.  What happens when lots of agents have same market?

I didn't even know you can do this....I was just researching for a new group that I am creating....I'm going to reblog this because I've seen a few post that are just promoting themselves and have written nothing of value.