Friend of the Creek question

[Scott Shepherd]

I notice there are a number of "Friends of the Creek" that have never posted a single time. Was that the intention of FOTC when it was set up? I thought the intention was to help promote people who contribute here to use each other's businesses, not simply to allow strangers to pay $50 to help their Search Engine Ranking.

Just a question, not a criticism. I saw several people with zero posts and it made me wonder if they were just trying to take advantage of the FOTC program.

[Keith Outten]

Our intention was indeed to help promote Members of this Community based on requests for a directory that started in the engraving forum. I did say in one of my responses that everyone would be welcome to participate. The financial support is more than welcome at this point. The response hasn't been overwhelming with less than 60 people from a group of almost 56,000 and the gain for everyone increases as more people participate, because more people will use the search feature.

The CNC Stinger Drawing was my idea to encourage people to join FOTC, I had hoped that it would entice at least enough people to pay for our investment in the machine. So it will take awhile to get more people to join FOTC, I will be patient, we still have a month to go before the drawing

When we finally upgrade to vBulletin 4 there will be more real estate on our main page to promote the FOTC Directory, we may even be able to rotate each record on the main page. In a couple more months we should have some stats available so we can start tracking the number of people that are using FOTC.
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[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks Keith, I'm asking because I'm more concerned of the ramifications it might have on search engines in the future. You might want to be careful, if it's seen as a "link farm", pay or not pay, google will strip it from their searches. I could see it easily becoming a link farm if anyone from anywhere can join, rather than being contributors to the community here. Might want to watch that and see what google considers a link farm. That can get your entire site dropped from searches. Some of it's considered black hat seo that can hurt your site. I know y'all know what you're doing, but thought it was worth reminding.

[Matt Meiser]

Related, do FOTC have to be listed in the index? For example, I don't have anything to advertise, don't want to give out my phone, don't have a web site, etc. I see there's a couple hobbyist categories, but right now there are just business posted in there.