Question about posting to community forums
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This is about previous posts I have made under a different user name. When I was just getting started in WordPress I posted a few questions about some problems I was having. The problems have all been solved either through helpful replies and/or my figuring it out for myself. But now Google has referenced these posts as the first thing that comes up in a Google search under my blog (user) name, so the first thing anyone searching for my blog will be shown are links with titles such as XXXuser nameXXX ‘Help image not showing on first page’ (title of forum post) or some other question that now not only looks ignorant but could be mis-read as my site is experiencing problems.
So my question is, how can I delete or hide these old question posts so they are not the first thing that comes up on Google during a word search for my blog (user) name? I’ve searched and can’t find any way to remove by myself, or mark posts to be removed by admin.
This post is under another user name, so it will not become another link referenced by Google in a search for my blog. Thank you.
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You can’t really, and the reason that they appear before any of your posts is that the wordpress.COM site pages, including the forum pages, have huge amounts of Google juice. In fact, typically any new post to the forums here will show up in Google searches within a minute of them being posted on the forums. The main wordpress.com forum page has a PR of 8/10. That is where places like techcrunch.com and gigaom.com are.
Best thing to do is to keep posting to your blog and work on increasing your blog page rank so that you end up higher in search results, but the fact is that even raincoaster, who gets thousands of hits per day on her blog doesn’t outrank wordpress.com.
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Thanks, I understand but that’s really too bad that older posts can’t be deleted. In fact, I mistakenly posted this original question twice, and I see only a few hours later my double post is gone. So there IS a way for the posts to ‘go away’, it just doesn’t seem to be the usual practice. If I had known my forum questions would become the number one associated link to my user name on Google, I never would have posted those questions. :( Now they will haunt me for who knows how long.
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Duplicate Posts are deleted in many cases if they are caught soon enough, if there are already replies in both threads then one is usually closed with a reference to the thread still open, a housekeeping issue really.
Spam is also removed so the Spammers will not get any benefit from posting, keeps things cleaner.
There is very little editing of Posts – mostly remove spam links or email or passwords (sometimes people are so desperate for help they post their user name and password in the Forum). I have also seen some obscenity removed (this forum is open to all ages)
Just they way this forum works, I am a member of another Forum and you can go back and edit your entry months later, and that has resulted in some different problems.
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The duplicate posts aren’t typically deleted, what happens is they are “closed” and I think staff has a way of hiding them from view here, but that doesn’t mean that they are deleted here or that they disappear from the search engines. The search engines will hang onto them for 3-6 months minimum in most cases, and in the case of Yahoo, they never seem to delete anything.
In the past, staff has refused to delete posts or threads in the forums by request. They simply don’t typically do it unless there is a personal attack by some raving lunatic or something like that, and then in many cases they will only edit out the attacks and close the thread, not delete the post or the thread.
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