deliciousDelicious has long been known for their outward dislike for search marketers and even went as far as to nofollow the ENTIRE site a while back to deter any potential use of Delicious as a marketing tool.

Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, spoke at the first SMX Social Media conference in 2007, and said that they had implemented the nofollow tag because they had no mechanism in place to prevent spam and needed someway to prevent people from trying to abuse Delicious.

If you believe in collective memory and collective voting, why nofollow links? Because they are trying to discourage spam. Danny Sullivan wonders if it actually is a deterrent. They say yes. And if they could eliminate spam other ways would they get rid of the nofollow? They said maybe, but they think that having nofollow keeps away the motivation for spamming.” – SearchEngineLand

However, while they may not have had much in the way of spam prevention a year and half ago, they seem to have a few tricks up their sleeve now.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ‘silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

For those of you not familiar with the term ‘silent ban’, it is when a site effectively bans you without letting you know or giving you any indication that your actions on that site no longer have any value. The only other site that I know of that uses ‘silent bans’ is Reddit.

I should note as well, that I do not spam or really use Delicious much at all. So I am a little curious as to what triggers the penalty.

I would be interested if anyone else has some information on this. If so, please comment below.

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