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I was thinking about adding a sub4sub subscriber exchange section to my forum area about Youtube. Before I do, I wanted to know if the Google search engine would dislike this as they own Youtube.

Would things like sub4sub or like4like etc on a forum, blog or website mean that Google and other search engines would lower my website page ranks in search results and have a negative impact on SEO?

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Google rarely reveals the factors they use when calculating a sites position in the search rankings. It's also impossible to know the weight of each factor, but what we do know is that backlinks is the most influential and Google has said that trading links is against their guidelines because it is manipulation of search results.

Google has never confirmed they use social media likes or followers as a factor however many top SEO'ers believe that social media presence increases trust. Assuming that this is the case then you should assume that Google has things in place to detect such activities. If this is the case then its very detectable.

You should also be aware that Twitter and Facebook do not allow such activities and regularly remove likes, followers and so on regularly.Your best of spending your efforts on improving your social presence naturally, however slow it may be it'll be better than 1000's of users that will do nothing for your site.

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  • I am aware of this and do natural social networking, this would instead be a forum area where people can choose to do it or not and if yes then add the account they want to share follows with. I ask because i don't want that one forum area to lower my search results, i guess it is unknown like you say. Though i know that things like traffic exchanges and sub4sub websites can have high ranks but this could be from non search engine traffic and affiliates etc so it is hard to know if it is ok.
    – zeddex
    Nov 3, 2016 at 18:31
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Trading for something will always make any website low quality. Take a example of this website. It's not about what you're doing with Youtube, then you'll lose your ranking because it is Google own product. It applies the same to other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The thread gonna post by any user does not have any value, which make your webpages low quality and those pages will kept some juicyrank, so no more juicyrank will left for other important webpages.

If you want to start that kind of sub forum, I highly recomend to block such thing from Googlebot/spider via robots.txt or use meta header tags.

The conclusion is indexing low quality content will make your website performance lower in SERP. It's apply to all topics.

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  • The site you link to i know very well and was one of the places that i got the idea from, they do traffic exchanges there and make bots for Youtube constantly yet it's in and out of the top 10k websites online according to Alexa, they also list well in google despite the content. I was wondering if that was just the case because of the domain age, amount of backlinks and members it has though as a new rival forum might just get down ranked quickly unless it gains the same status.
    – zeddex
    Nov 4, 2016 at 8:09
  • Also i did want to block search engines with robots.txt, i posted here and they told me to make a new thread regarding the SEO questions about sub4sub: stackoverflow.com/questions/40388825/phpbb-robots-txt-rules/…
    – zeddex
    Nov 4, 2016 at 8:10
  • I given that example, because that site I was found many years ago when I was search some bot online. It was helpful on that time, but after few years, it was perform poorly in SERP, and it is just because of low quality content is higher than quality content. I don't know more about bulletin software, so Can't say more.
    – Goyllo
    Nov 4, 2016 at 10:39

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