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Dereference (new) profile pages to limit spam exposure and disincentivise spam accounts

Pierre Mesure

18/03/2022 15:46

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Many platforms are suffering from spam bots creating accounts with profiles promoting services in their profile picture, description and personal URL.

The suspect reason behind them creating accounts is to be able to spread links and keywords in the wider web by increasing their exposition.

As you can see in the attached picture, spam profiles are easy to find on search engines such as Google (in the example, a simple search for "decidim escort" finds 4 spam profiles for escorts)

Describe the solution you'd like

Following the improvement made by @ahu to prevent spammers from gaining traffic and SEO juice from their actions, I found this page from Google describing some tips to reduce comment spam on websites.

One of the suggestions is to dereference the profile pages from Google and other search engines to reduce even further the reward.

To achieve that, one way is to add in the <head> of the profile pages:

Describe alternatives you've considered

The documentation from Google adds that this can be done in a more targeted way, for example by disabling referencing only for new users. The tag could be added when generating the page for users who created their profile less than a month ago, or users with less than 3 proposals published...

In the same vein, the dereferencing could also be applied to new proposals?

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

Could this issue have an impact on users private data?

Funded by

Funded by Digidem Lab.