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A forum spammer caught red handed
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Forum link spammer? We have no sympathy

Link removal request

Posted on 16 May 2013 by Matt Russell

We maintain a forum at http://forum.webhostingbuzz.com to serve our customers, to facilitate to discussion and to use as an occasional announcement platform. Of late, it has been largely redundant due to our updated status platform and our increasingly popular Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. But the forum generally sits there, minding it’s own business and getting the odd post from some of our older customers and generally those that don’t talk to us on social media. I still check the forum on a daily basis, as do a number of my team.

vBulletin & spam

vBulletin, the forum platform we use, does horde a dark and dirty secret. It is a very attractive forum for spammers to target and attempt to use for link building techniques. It is important to note two things;

  1. vBulletin has tried had to bring in anti-spam measures to make forums harder to spam. These generally seem less effective than WordPress, but many of the vBulletin spam is done by real people that can circumvent automatic checks
  2. Google has long since banned these link building techniques and they’re more likely to get you a penalty than do you any good

Nontheless, on an almost daily basis, we have to remove spammy forum posts. Sometimes these are attempts at links, despite us having a minimum threshold before a link is activated. And other posts are weak attempts to boost post counts to a level where a member can actually post links. Most of these spam bots or spam humans stop posting before they reach this level, or we catch them in the act.

But one thing we don’t do is moderate forum registrations. We get a lot of people that register on our forum that never visit or post. I guess that it’s a PageRank 6 forum helps and makes it attractive for these link spammers.

Today, for the first time, we received a link removal request from a company that has previously spammed our forum.

Link removal request

Link removal request received from a forum spammer

We generally don’t hold grudges. The IP of the forum spammer, mentioned in that link, traces back to an ISP in Pakistan. So my assumption is the company requesting the link removal either hired this person, or hired an SEO agency that used this person in the hope of artificially inflating their rank. Many people, us included, have fallen foul of so called ‘SEO Agencies’ offering supposed white hat techniques. But this particular forum spammer registered just 1 year ago back in April 2012.  This was well into evolved Panda and Penguin territory so there’s really no excuse to be practicing such poor link building techniques.

I feel our offer is fair. It takes time to remove these spammy links but more importantly, we’ve spent a countless amount of time trying to keep our forum clean. Let’s see if they take us up on our generous offer. Updates will be posted here.

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