Profile Spamming

PROFILE SPAMMING

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Profiles are meant to help people identify themselves on a forum or social networking site or other areas where their friends can easily find them. Most of these sites that help list your profile also favor adding a link or multiple links in a profile. Even some social networking sites helps you create profile with link and make them available public.

Profile listing is not only available for individuals but also for companies. Lots of companies list their profile on various sites and even search engine manipulators use these profile listing sites to add links to their client sites or their own sites. All of a sudden a new industry has emerged. Although the motive of the industry is just to be helpful to people, search engine manipulators have found ways to exploit it. We consider this as a form of search engine manipulation, because these days lot of aggressive SEOs use it to gain search engine benefit.

Forums are the biggest victims of profile spamming. Most forums give visitor access to all member lists. PHPBB the most popular PHP based forum has the member list link right on the top menu which gives top level access to all visitors and visiting search engines. Search engine spammers target this list and create lot of junk profiles with links to their spam websites. Forums that are not moderated often are victims of these kinds of spamming. Forum profile spammers are to go great lengths to mask their profile by making it look as genuine as possible. They create valid looking profiles even with genuine looking pictures. Sometimes hackers get into profile spam due to high level of search engine benefit involved. They hack into popular posters profiles and send junk marketing campaign messages or add links in footer postings and profile to fool the search engines.

Search Engines are tackling this effectively as per our research.

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The image below depicts a fake profile that exists in the web, these kinds of fake profiles are created to manipulate the search engine and deceive the search engine users.