NoIndex
AboutUs.org is a wiki. Every day, thousands of people visit our site, and a large number contribute to the pages here, adding their knowledge about specific websites and topics they care about. We encourage people to improve the pages about their own websites, or websites they’re familiar with, adding links to those websites. This helps our visitors discover sites that could be valuable to them, and easily navigate to those sites from AboutUs.
A few visitors, however, try to use our site in ways that aren’t constructive. Some, for example, try to use the AboutUs page about their website to launder links. This means they spread the link to the AboutUs page all over the web through comment spam [link], paid links [link] or link farms – all with the intent of having the spam links point to the AboutUs page, instead of to their own website.
Why would someone launder links?
Google and other major search engines regard links coming from an authoritative website to a web page as an indication that the page has valuable content. These links are considered when search engines rank the web page in search results.
Search engines are very good at determining whether a link is spam or a true indication of value, and penalize sites that engage in linking strategies intended to artificially boost their rankings.
AboutUs is widely regarded as an authoritative site, because it has high traffic and good information. People sometimes direct hundreds or even thousands of links to the AboutUs page about their – or their clients’ – website, hoping to signal that the page is valuable and push it higher in search rankings. The plan is to get the benefit of lots of inbound links without risking a penalty to their own website.
Using our pages to launder links violates the spirit and purpose of search engines, and we do not tolerate it. We advise Google and other major search engines to remove pages with this type of linking from their indexes. That means these pages will no longer be found when someone uses a search engine, making this ranking strategy a useless effort.
Link spam
Sometimes naïve or unscrupulous marketers add links to their own websites – or their clients’ websites – to hundreds of unrelated AboutUs pages in a misguided attempt to generate more traffic directly to websites. We promptly remove these links from our pages, and we ban the people who placed them from making any further edits to AboutUs pages.
We have a NoFollow policy for these links, so there is no value in creating them.
Reinclusion
If you feel you’ve been the victim of a black hat [link] SEO (search engine optimization) agency that’s used AboutUs inappropriately to generate traffic to your website, let us know by sending an email to 
. We’ll evaluate the activity we’ve seen and reconsider your situation.