BP Update 5.0.5: User Blogs / Profile Updates

[Joshua Dorkin]

We've made a few system updates that just went live. These are mostly internal changes, but there are some changes that our users may notice. The essence behind this update it to ensure that people who come to the site to spam their websites don't get rewarded by the search engines for doing so.

If a user is just posting content designed for the search engines, they will not get any SEO benefit anymore for those posts.

The last thing that we want is people taking advantage of BP to benefit themselves if they are just posting garbage content or keyword stuffing, and as such, have added made it so flagged blogs have "nofollow" links. Additionally, new blogs will be nofollow until they have made 5 posts.

We've also set user website links located in their profiles to be nofollow until the user has posted 15 posts in the forums or 5 times on their blog.

We believe that rewarding users who contribute to the community with BP link love provides added reason to get involved (as opposed to creating a profile and expecting SEO benefit for doing so) and will de-incentivize the spammers.

Of course, we fully expect people to try to manipulate these rules, but we have our ways to deal with that.

We've got some very important fixes to make to our PRO accounts and will be making those next