I absolutely detest these faux SEOs who run link spamming communities. These people have no clue how to really optimize for search. They just sell, share, or recommend link spamming robots that create fake user accounts and profiles on blogs and forums for the sake of “link building”.
Backlinksforum.com is running a contest requiring members to embed a link to their profile page on backlinksforum.com. It should be easy enough to detect any of these link spam accounts in your user profiles. Here are some suggestions for those of you who run forums or blogs, or who have clients who run forums or blogs.
- Delete ALL user accounts whose member profiles link back to backlinksforum.com
- Modify your robots.txt file to block search engine crawlers from indexing your member profile pages (you can just put “Disallow: *profile* if you don’t know exactly how to do this)
- Turn on all confirming functions that help your forums and blogs verify user accounts, including email confirmation and use of CAPTCHA images
- Ban all domain names that are associated with these member profile accounts so they cannot be used to create new accounts
- Look for any user profiles that include the word “man” in any profile field like “interests” — this is an indication that the user account was created with software
- Delete ALL user accounts that are awaiting confirmation after 1 day
- Delete ALL user accounts that have 0 post counts and which were registered with odd looking domain names
You can do the Web community a HUGE favor by Tweeting this post, Sphinning it, DIGGing it, sharing it in any way whatsoever, and by writing your own warnings on your blogs and forums, or in forums where you are a regular member (if the forum moderators allow you to do that), or in any email newsletters you contribute to.
Tom Goodwin, a moderator at Backlinksforum.com, has been using a spam link software application to create fake user profiles in forums. The software will automatically populate several fields in VBulletin user profiles with single word or phrase information like “Man” for interests, “United Kingdom” for location, maybe the fake user account name, and sometimes “Man” again for good measure.
This software has been used by other link spammers as well.
Google’s Web spam team should be able to easily find and filter out these links if it has access to forum profile pages, but I would hope that the forums are not going to be penalized because these robots ALSO get past CAPTCHAs and confirmation emails. It’s possible there is some level of human interaction.
If anyone can name the software that is creating these accounts and provide more information on how it works, please do so in the comments here on SEO Theory.
These kinds of links are invasive, unethical, and they risk destroying the search reputation of any Website that unintentionally allows them. I have had to monitor SF-Fandom’s user registrations every day to delete these accounts because they get past all current safeguards. There is a discussion in the VBulletin user community about how the spammers have broken all the anti-spam safeguards, so currently the only way to ensure you don’t end up hosting these link accounts is to review your user registrations.
SF-Fandom’s member profile pages are blocked in robots.txt so the search engines will never even see these pages.
Tom Goodwin, I call upon you to stop your unethical link building practices and join the reputable SEO community in using only non-invasive linking practices that won’t put other people’s Websites at risk.
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