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Author: M.Prince (8 Aug 06 12:37pm)
M.Heumann --
Two great questions.
First, we will only include honey pots in the shared pool if our spider (the Verispider) ensures that they are actually honey pots. Still, you raise a good point that someone could substitute the destination page from being a honey pot to being something else. If that were to happen, we'd notice because the honey pot verification would fail. The links would be on some sites, but we could notify the QuickLinkers that the honey pot was no longer active. Since we're goign to limit, pretty severely, the number of Linkers for each honey pot, I think any benefit that an individual page could get would be limited. Moreover, since we'll encourage the Linkers to make the links they use hidden -- which Google and other legitimate search engines tend to down-weight or ignore -- it again shouldn't cause enough benefit to be worth much abuse. However, it's definitely a good point and something we will think about as we implement the systme.
Second, I'm not sure how Google would penalize your pagerank. However, I confess I'm not wise to all of Google's ways (anyone outside of Google is). Google is aware of the Project. Some of our engineers have participated in blog spam conferences they've hosted. We have a dialogue with their search ranking folks, so I would hope that if they were to consider penalizing anything we encouraged they'd talk to us first. I also am not sure how a site overall would be penalized. Google doesn't like hidden links, so it doesn't give them much weight. The worst that it seems could happen is the honey pot page on your site would be penalized -- but so what?
Here's maybe the best evidence that it doesn't hurt your pagerank. Unspam and Project Honey Pot host some honey pots for folks who, for whatever reason, weren't able to install them themselves. (This is part of how we originally came up with the idea.) We've seen no adverse reaction to our overall PageRank for either site (both of which I believe are currently 7s) since sharing these honey pots. In fact, other sites where we've done the same thing have actually gone up in rankings. (BTW: I think this is coincidence, not causality.) There, of course, is no way of knowing what Google will do going forward. However, our best evidence so far is that sharing honey pots does not currently hurt your rankings.
We will, of course, continue to monitor this as the program starts up over the next month. If you have any suggestions on how we can make it better, please let us know.
Thanks for your input!!
Matthew.
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