patrick.net

Still don't know what the stars mean and why some threads have them.

An outside source links to the post.

Rew says

An outside source links to the post.

The prize goes to Rew!

Yes, a post with outside links to it gets a gold star. Click to the gold star to see all outside links to posts by any given author.

Most of the outside links are from Google, but ok, whatever.

BTW, perfectly fine, and even encouraged, to place links to your own posts in whatever forum or site you can. Get a star!

rando says

Most of the outside links are from Google, but ok, whatever.

Won't Google index everything like within a month?

How are you detecting outside links? Through the ref URL parameter?

Besides Google and Bing, the inbound links appear to come from just link farms.

Dan8267 says

Besides Google and Bing, the inbound links appear to come from just link farms.

Example? Why would there be any link farms pointing to patrick.net? It's not like I have any budget for that!

Dan8267 says

rando says

Most of the outside links are from Google, but ok, whatever.

Won't Google index everything like within a month?

How are you detecting outside links? Through the ref URL parameter?

Google indexes new content within minutes, not a month. All the other search engines are the same. It's amazing to watch the log files.

I'm detecting outside links via the referer parameter in the logs.

rando says

Google indexes new content within minutes

That's pretty jaw dropping. How many machines do they have pointed at the web to accomplish that?

They probably index the most active sites and pages more frequently, giving the impression of omniscience. Maybe some old site wouldn't get any robot attention.

Duckduckgo is pretty amazing too, given how small they are by comparison to Google.

rando says

Example? Why would there be any link farms pointing to patrick.net? It's not like I have any budget for that!

I wouldn't think that you'd link farm. But there are a lot of companies that scrap sites to auto-generate content and links. They use external links just to stay under Google's radar and look like a site with human users.

At the risk of giving them more cred in Google's eyes, the following two examples stick out:
http://cooooolest.com/post/57080485876/tom-ford-magnus-sunglasses-these-awesome-tom-ford
http://json.tv/ict_news_read/prinadlejaschaya-google-kompaniya-nest-labs-otkryvaet-svoyu-platformu-dlya-razrabotchikov

So linking to my site helps them? Strange.

It seems like most people on the planet try to make a living scamming others.