You've all heard there's no such thing as bad publicity. On the internet this is doubly true. When you link to a website — regardless of the reason — this strengthens its position in search engines. This means that a bad review of a website makes it more popular.
When you are discussing or alerting others to a website
that promotes a fraud, scam, cult or other questionable business
and you link to that site, search engines will (after a while) improve the offending site's rank.
Therefore, more people will find these shady websites,
and will be exposed to their content without getting the proper context.
With donotlink.com, you can link to sites without giving them "Google juice".
Donotlink uses three different ways to block search engines from crawling a link. So you can post the link on forums, message boards, facebook, twitter, reddit, and other public places without giving shady websites any undue credibility.
Using donotlink.com instead of linking to questionable websites directly will prevent your links from improving these websites' position in search engines.
Much like standard url shorteners, donotlink creates a shortened url to the website you submit. Just use this url instead of linking directly to the website, and we'll do the rest.
If you don't want to visit donotlink.com every time you use this service, you can also put "http://www.donotlink.com/" before the website's url like this:
http://www.donotlink.com/www.example.com/shady/stuff.html
Donotlink routes links to questionable sites through a unique intermediate url that forwards the visitor to the destination through javascript.
But we don't stop there. We are continually improving our algorithms — a clever combination of blacklists and bayesian inference — that identify crawlers and bots, so even search engines and scrapers that don't play by any rules will get caught out.