Modification to Linking policy

We have just modified our policy regarding outbound links from the forums. This includes any links from your posts, signature, and member profile. The following text has been added to the rules:

Quote: Links in Posts, Signatures, and Profiles

Links to "bad neighbourhoods" are not allowed in forum posts, signatures or profiles. This includes, but is not limited to pornography, penile enlargement aids, shady casino gambling or pharmaceutical sales sites, link farms, splogs, and sites that have been banned from search engines. We are doing this partly to protect our visitors but also to protect our site from being associated with bad neighbourhoods and therefore hurting our own link value.

We may also remove links that have keywords rather than a human-centered description as the target text. If it looks like something that might show up in blog spam it is probably not allowed and will be removed by moderators. Links from forums do not carry very much value in the first place. It is probably not worth your while to attempt to manipulate your links from this forum to get higher search engine rankings.

We would appreciate it if you all could help us out and warn us about any links that may fall into this restrictions. Here is some more information about how to identify "bad neighbourhoods" and sites that have been banned from search engines. You can notify us by using the "report this post" links at the bottom of each post, or from the Contact Us form at the bottom of the page.

You can find out more about the potential problems with linking to bad neighbourhoods at SEOmoz. That site chose to put rel=nofollow into all profile links in order to prevent people from abusing their link value. We really do not want to have to go that far. Your continued assistance in identifying bad links can help us keep this small reward in place.