101 Articles Forum Spamming
FORUM SPAMMING
If you ever run a forum you will definitely come across spamming. You start a forum then you setup different category and sub category then wait for posts to come in. Say if you are running PHPBB forum and if you have guest posting enabled you will note that the frequent guest posts will not come from your friends or quality visitors but from the spammers. They find your forum through Google or by any other way then check for any potential vulnerable areas where they can insert their post and once they realize the forum is open they stuff your forums with all sorts of nasty spam ( porn links , pharmacy products , gambling and all sort of spam ). Of course you don't want to run a forum filled with spam. It's not good for the real people who want to read and be a part of your forum.
Forum spamming is bad it takes a lot of time to clean things and also it brings bad reputation with your users as well as search engines. Some times to make the post look legitimate, they might just copy the posting from some other site and will post in your forum in this case make sure you search Google and find out whether the post is legitimate or not.
Forum spamming today are primarily targeted towards the search engines. Spammers try to insert their links into forums so that they can get some link benefit from a good forum to their spam sites. The more links they have and more that comes from good sources and better their sites will rank. Most of these search engine spammers know that and they target forums today for this purpose. Phpbb, Vbulletin are some of the popular forums targeted by these search engine manipulators. Spammers also post forum signature links.
To prevent such type of spamming:
1. Make sure you have the updated version of the forum as older versions will have vulnerabilities which the spammers are ready to exploit.
2. Don't ever allow guest posting. Make sure users need to register and post. Also to avoid automated registrations enable email verification and captcha verification.
3. Monitor your forums actively keep moderators who monitor your forum regularly. Aggressive search engine optimizers are inventing different ways to spam forums it is important that forums are regularly monitored.
4. Delete any suspicious users, especially people who register have a URL in their profile but never did even a single post. Most of these guys are there to insert their URLs or just to spam forum.
5. Block suspicious IP addresses and traffic. Sometimes lot of hits from a single IP is an indication that the person is trying to do something with your forum.
There is more to add to it but be aware that some SEO companies are inventing new ideas to spam forums. It is difficult to bring total awareness; you need to be up to date on every possible spam attack. Forum spam causes damage to search engines and they are strict against it. Sometimes Google is known to remove complete forum out of their index due to excessive spam.
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Another area for link spammers and other seedy content is within forums. If a forum is not heavily moderated, and you find posts like these, it's a good idea not to join in on the discussion. Spammy links and other irrelevant content are posted into forums in order to manipulate the search engines.
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What is a forum spambot?
Forum spam bots are automated programs that post abusive or unwanted posts on the web. These spam bots, look for guest books, forums, blogs etc and post spam links into them. These spam links are either posted to increase the search engine ranking or to simply cheat the readers. Most of the spammy links that are posted into forums are either done to attract more traffic to the commercial sites or to redirect the users to an unrelated site. An example of such a forum spam bot can be "XRumer"
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The pie chart below reveals that majority of the websites have been attacked by spambots while the rest have not been affected by it or are yet to verify it.
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Working Examples |
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |