Steemit needs to protects against spam, or else...

French version here : https://steemit.com/fr/@referencement/steemit-a-besoin-de-se-proteger-contre-le-spam-sinon
Every social website faced some spam risks at the beginning of its life. Steemit is one of them.

I write this article in English (sorry for typos) in order to warn Steemit about the risk of penalty from Google that will disrupt Steemit growth. Maybe Steemit team will read it, maybe not but if you plan to do a social network this article will guide you on how Google works with this kind of websites and how spammers can use them.
If you are a spammer, sorry not sorry.

Why Steemit can be spammed

Google (and all other search engines) works with various algorithm. Some says that there are more than 500 criterias in order to rank websites, other says a lot less. There have been one "leak" from a Google engineer that summarize criterias with 3 major points :

1. Links
2. Content
3. Rankbrain

Rankbrain is a big piece and this is useless to try to understand it yet as it's a work in progress. We can replace it by user behavior even if some SEO will hit the roof reading that.

Right now, let's focus on the criteria that anyone can (try to) manipulate : links

Steemit have a lot of links

A lot of SEO says "you need more links to rank higher in Google". This is partially true as every links are not created equals.
In order to stay on the spam topic, I will not explain further right now, just understand that one link from a high authority website is better than a million links from useless forum. Topic proximity is also a factor of quality of links.
These criterias are calculated with a SEOtool called "MajesticSEO". Below, I use a tool called "SEObserver" in order to display a lot of details on the domain importance

You will see a lot of things :

• Trust flow : Score /100 (100 the higher) of authority on the web. This measure quality i.e : Google and Facebook have a value of 100
• Citation flow : Score / 100 proportionnal to the number of citation. This measure quantity
• Topical trustFlow (down left) : The differents websites' topics where the link come from
• Trafic and keyword from SEMRUSH (down right) : Estimation of trafic (in blue) and keyword (in green) where steemit appears on Google (just google France in this case)

If you read it like a SEO you will see that :

• Have a link on steemit will give you a good authority
• Steemit is getting more and more traffic and visibility

Conclusion : A link on Steemit is something that can boost your SEO and, right now, there are no protection to make them

The nofollow policy

If I make a link like :

Google

it will be transform in HTML like this :

<a href="http://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">Google</a>

Steemit will put a rule to tell google to "not follow" it. The name of these links are "nofollow" links. However, in some parts of the website some links are not protected. I won't explain where to avoid steemit to be spammed.

Steemit is (too much) open

One file that is really important in SEO is the robots.txt file. When you go on every website, try to add /robots.txt on the root domain in order to see what pages are hidded for search engines.
You can specify what pages or group of pages and what search engine you want to block
Right now, Steemit policy is wide open, here are the two lines of code :

User-agent: *
Allow: /

I hope it won't be the case anymore when you will read this article.
User-agent: * means that the rules below applies to every robots. The Allow: / means that the robots can access every URL which start with a / (= every pages on the website)

Conclusion of this chapter

• Steemit is a very good place to have a link on
• Every pages on Steemit can be accessed by search engines robots
• Some links can be followed by Google

These are the 3 rules of a good link spam spot

How Steemit can prevent this to happen

These rules can be applied in every social website where contributions are open. No need to be extreme and block all links on the page, you can change some parameters to prevent spam to happen.

The robots protection

If you are doing SEO, this must be the beginning of your journey. Changing robots.txt is both easy and powerful in this context.
I can't write what specific pages needs to be blocked (If Steemit wants to hire me just leave a comment :D). However, you can be inspired by other social networks. Here is one good exemple : Quora robots.txt file
Work with both User Agent and Disallow rules. Allow rule is useless as it's the default behavior of search engines.

The nofollow policy

Steemit can apply a nofollow policy in its website by adding "rel=nofollow" in every external links on its website.
The use of meta robots="nofollow, index" is to avoid as it will tells to robots to not follow both internal and external links.

However, having a good external link policy can be a great thing in order to increase quality. Here are some links that can be leaved as followed by default :

• Bio page link
• White-listed external links
• Links on trending post (or very high quality in one topic)

The power of the community

Something I already saw in some posts is the power of community. By doing this article, I was very impressed that words like "Viagra" or "Payday loans" where not used in articles as they are regular spammy anchors (text on the link). That means that Steemit already have something against spam. I tend to believe this is the power of community or maybe that the signup process is too restrictive to attract spammers.
The community is also a very good asset that protects website from the spam, if you already watch what is good or wrong thank you !

It takes little time to protect against spam, what are you waiting for ?

This is the end of this long article. I know a lot of people hates SEO as it's seen like a manipulation of rankings ; I hope that this article will show you that it can also be used to protect website. If you disagree with me or if you want to add something feel free to add a comment.

Long live Steemit !