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Can/should Tildes pull out of search engine results?
The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO from infiltrating the site? I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I know reddit has the option to prevent your profile from getting indexed by search engines so perhaps that could be applied to the site as a whole.
Tildes actually has restrictions in place related to that already. Even though it doesn't use rel="nofollow" on anything (which is all that reddit does to "protect" users profiles, AFAIK), logged out users (and so crawlers too) viewing this site can only see a small portion of the first page of everyone's user profile. Just view your own profile page in private browsing to see how restricted it is. And for reasonably active users, that restriction doesn't allow a whole lot to be indexed by crawlers.
As for taking Tildes off search engine results entirely though, I would personally vote no. Tildes internal search is pretty decent, but it's still limited in what it can do (e.g. it can't get results from comments or topic text, search by domains/URL, etc), and being able to find older posts here via search engines is incredibly useful.
p.s. Deimos also already does a damn good job of keeping SEO boosting crap and SPAM off the site, IMO. He created AutoModerator and used to be reddit's "anti-evil" engineer, so has a fair amount of experience handling that sort of thing, and I am not too worried about it taking over the site... especially since it's invite only, which makes bans a lot more potent. ;)
Tildes isn’t a private forum and I don’t think we should pretend that it is. Anyone could be reading your posts by joining Tildes using an alias. We give out invites pretty freely to strangers, and technically most of us are strangers to each other.
So I think anyone serious about privacy should post under an alias, change usernames every so often, but still be reluctant to post anything possibly identifying. There is somewhat of a chilling effect to that, but I prefer to think of it as being prudent.
And then if you’re taking those precautions anyway, why not allow the strangers who use search engines to benefit from what you write? That’s kind of the point of publishing things openly.