WebmasterWorld: Community vs. Bots

Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld.com is arguably one of the most successful communities on the Web, boasting tens of thousands of members, a large and active group of fee-paying “Supporters”, and an unusually high Alexa ranking that keeps it in the top 500 sites and occasionally in the top 250. A good portion of the community’s growth over the years can be attributed to visitors from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Historically, a search for a webmaster-related tech topic produced a listing of a WebmasterWorld discussion on the topic more often than not. New arrivals were often surprised by the friendly and helpful nature of the community, and ended up becoming regular participants.

So, when Tabke announced that he was banning all search engine bots for at least a couple of months by excluding them in the site’s robots.txt files, most observers were stunned. Not only would this move dry up search engine referrals, but it would also eliminate site search capability for members and visitors. (The massive growth in content at WMW had long overwhelmed the capacity of the home-grown BestBBS search utility, and members have been encouraged to conduct site-limited searches at Google et al.)

Reactions to Tabke’s move varied. Greg “Webguerilla” Boser suggested that Tabke was losing his mind, while Oilman blogged screenshots of submitting the WMW site to Google’s removal utility. It’s likely that Oilman’s effort was just one of many after Tabke’s announcement. And, it appears that those who speculated that a separate robots.txt file was being fed to Google via cloaking were wrong - amazingly, Google now shows no pages for WebmasterWorld.com.

My guess is that Tabke isn’t losing his mind. He’s been building communities since the early BBS days of the 1980s, and has a good understanding of how communities gain new members and keep them coming back. He also knows search engines inside and out. And the WebmasterWorld community is his passion, not an idle pastime. My take: having just completed a successful Pubcon in Las Vegas, Tabke has apparently decided to push a pile of chips into the pot with what appear to be a couple of weak cards showing. Without seeing the rest of his hand, though, I’d be reluctant to bet against him.

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