Better is hiding links than only adding rel=nofollow like vbseo dose

Plugin Hide Links From Guests - vBulletin.org Forum working nice for me especially against spammers, who like to post in forum useless posts for just having external links propagated to their sits from my forum.
But more it helping to keep my pages free of many useless external links and pushing guests register to see the link.

Of course vbseo has nice alternative - adding the rel="nofollow" to any external links, but I think it would be nice future for next vbseo releas, to hide external link at all, like the mentioned plugin is doing, instead of leaving the link open for humans, but closing only for search bots.

Please feel free to submit this as a feature request within vBSEO Plugin Feature Suggestions

However i personally don't like the idea of hiding any url. I don't think it is a good option as you will force users to join your site. However i personally prefer people who will not participate forums actively not registering to my site. Regular visitors should be able to browse your site in a similar fashion as members so they can find what they are looking for easily and they can return back later. If i visit a site that hides some info from non members , i personally immediately browse out from that site and never visit them again.

I suggest disallowing guests/new users from being able to post anything until they have X posts.

here's an example from vb3.
What countries do you ban, totally

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Please feel free to submit this as a feature request within vBSEO Plugin Feature Suggestions

However i personally don't like the idea of hiding any url. I don't think it is a good option as you will force users to join your site. However i personally prefer people who will not participate forums actively not registering to my site. Regular visitors should be able to browse your site in a similar fashion as members so they can find what they are looking for easily and they can return back later. If i visit a site that hides some info from non members , i personally immediately browse out from that site and never visit them again.

Are you sure, that you always browse out from vbulletin.org , where not even simple links but code quotations are closed?
The effect with forcing guests to register to see the link, is only additional effect that a hiding link mods could bring, I personally not believing that this could bring so much new users, they will register at most to see the link and will not return if forum is not interesting one.

What the main profit of such a hiding of links is - spammers, they are losing interest to fill you forum with spam just to get extra linkback to their sites. Additionaly, search engines from my experience, weighting the pages with less links as with more unique content.

Originally Posted by voter

Are you sure, that you always browse out from vbulletin.org , where not even simple links but code quotations are closed?
The effect with forcing guests to register to see the link, is only additional effect that a hiding link mods could bring, I personally not believing that this could bring so much new users, they will register at most to see the link and will not return if forum is not interesting one.

What the main profit of such a hiding of links is - spammers, they are losing interest to fill you forum with spam just to get extra linkback to their sites. Additionaly, search engines from my experience, weighting the pages with less links as with more unique content.

I don't browse vBulletin.org that often. Last couple months i only visited couple times.

.org is basically the ONLY site in that niche. If you want a vb mod, 99% of them are on .org.

If you can't say the same for your site, i assure you that making people register to see anything will either
a) end up with tons of users with 0 posts (what's the point? just takes up db space)
b) users will simply click the back button and you'll have a huge bounce rate and low visit length, which if coming from google, they will know this and you will lose ranking because the visits they are sending you obviously didn't find what they were looking for with said term.

As I mentioned, hiding links to push people register is just addition effect, about which one can discuss a lot.

And I don't want a mod - more I have the one and using with interesting effect that we don't get so much spam anymore, as of links are automatically hidden and it is useless for spamers to post in forum with goal to get users and bots following the links.

What I am suggesting to vbSEO instead of "hiding" links only for bots with rel=nofollow, add a possibility to hide the link for all...

We will NEVER make anything that differentiates content/etc between bots and humans. Doing so is called cloacking and is a balckhat technique that can/will get your site completely banned from google forever.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

We will NEVER make anything that differentiates content/etc between bots and humans. Doing so is called cloacking and is a balckhat technique that can/will get your site completely banned from google forever.

Are you sure, that you are not doing already that?
Now with vbseo option, that puts rel=nofollow to links you provide different content to bots telling then the link is not important and must not be followed and humans could follow the link.

What I am speaking about exactly opposite, to HIDE both for bots and humans the link.

And Halloween is next week, so stop telling "scary fairytale" about google, we don't care about biggest garbage pail of humanity, but about to protect our forum from spam. For that the link hiding do better job, than any filters, human image system etc...

vBSEO is a SEO script , it is not designed to protect your board from Spam.

Originally Posted by voter

Are you sure, that you are not doing already that?
Now with vbseo option, that puts rel=nofollow to links you provide different content to bots telling then the link is not important and must not be followed and humans could follow the link.

this is in-correct.

BOTH see the SAME code. There is no cloaking involved.
While it may have done so in the past, today nofollow has next to nothing to do with bots 'following' a link or not. it's more about passing page rank.