SPAM Warning and How it May Affect Your Own Web Sites

[gnurob]

Hi everyone,

First off, this isn't in any way a complaint against Ride the Rock. The fact is, some spammers use very sophisticated methods of gaining access to web forums, and it's hard, even for professionals, to completely defeat them. If you're curious just how bad, consider this excerpt from Wikipedia:

Webmasters of topical forums face an ongoing battle against XRumer software, users of which are almost always in violation of forum terms of service, and/or have no interest in the actual forum topic. The users of the software have created an entire industry whose sole purpose is to protect internet sites against users of XRumer. Forum administration tasks against XRumer are often a constant, daily effort, which include identifying new user accounts that are from XRumer users, deleting posts/threads created by the software, and deleting/disabling the user accounts.

The easiest method to defeat Xrumer is to simply require the first post of any new forum member or blog poster to be approved before it can appear.

There are several helpful resources that help block forum spam, notably Stop Forum Spam, "www.keypic.com" and "www.botscout.com", both of which reference reports of forum spam by username and IP address. If a user/IP has appeared in the lists of either of those sites, it is highly likely that it is a black-hat user of XRumer. Common defensive actions by webmasters are to institute IP based posting bans on entire class C ranges of IP addresses used by the spammers.

The spam messages in a forum typically take the form of "link spam" which will often be included in older topics & private messages (PM's) leaving the newer threads and posted messages "clear" of apparent spam. Sophisticated spammers will copy posts from other areas of the site, giving the appearance of a valid, on-topic reply. The best clue that it is a spammer is that the links in the user profile are completely unrelated to the forum topic, and the posted messages, while seemingly within the general topic of the forum, will be non-sequiturs and out-of-place within the topic thread. Alternatively, the spammers post generic "I am excited to begin posting and contributing here." messages that are content-neutral.

I have been struggling with increasingly poor search results for my own company. This, despite my best efforts to build a good web site, primarily to serve customers, but also that ranks well with search engines like Google (e.g. relevant content, good data structure, navigation, link quality, back links, etc.). Recently, my web site (r o b e r t m i l l e r . c a) fell off the first 20 pages of Google for a very common search term, "home inspector" (this is part of what I do). Obviously, that is somewhat disastrous.

After a lot of time and research, I discovered that a number of "backlinks" (other web sites that link to my web site) have very poor reputations, and their reputations were very likely to be transferred to my own. A few things have been hurting RTR, most obvious is the fairly regular spam postings, and, less obvious, but equally bad, was the downtime last year. That shutdown broke thousands of links as well as hurt the reliability rating (again, not placing blame, the Internet is like the wild west).

This isn't a big deal, unless you include your own web sites in your Ride the Rock user profile. Besides the reputation issue, vBulletin makes the mistake including that link on every single post which, for most users, means hundreds of links back to your own. The second is every one of those links do not have the "NOFOLLOW" parameter which would have instructed search engines to just ignore them. The end result is those profile links appear to be spammy, because of the shear number of them, and they come from a web site that has a lower reputation. To add insult to injury, those spammers start re-using your links, and the same spam postings, all over the world. I found a few hundred common text and links.

So, my take on this. 1. Don't link to your own content in your profiles. 2. If you're dying in search engines, drop me a line (or Google about backlinks and reputations with SEO).

P.S. Still not blaming RTR. Just a warning. Cheers