How does forum spamming work?

SimonAH

Presumably these guys must work like ad-agencies and charge by the spam post for customers? I'm guessing though.

suzyb

I think it's more likely they charge a set fee per month with the promise of bringing in a certain amount of traffic or getting to a certain page on google and the spam is their way of trying to get that.

What they don't realise is there isn't actually any benefit as google lets links mature before it pays any attention to them. And spam links are never on forums long enough (according to the SEO guy sitting next to me :P).

sketchley

In simplistic terms google (and other search engines) score search results as being more relevant on the basis of how many times they are referred to on web and how many times the referring web site is refereed etc... If the spammers can get posts with multiple links on to the forum and google indexes it before the admins delete it than google will use it to rank the results should someone search for the item. On a popular website like Bike Radar this is good thing for the spammers. Of course once google re-indexes the page (which seems fairly frequent on BR) then the results change again. Google is of course very clever and results will be down graded if spam is suspected. Another angle is targeted adverts delivered by google ads for example, if something on the site is relevant to a particular subject then the advert will change to reflect the content on the page. So while you may not buy the product in the spam, it could trigger that add to display which you will click on and pay for.

The problems on the board are fixable though as there are spam plug ins and blockers for phpBB, BR just need to implement them.

EKE_38BPM

Sketchley wrote:

The problems on the board are fixable though as there are spam plug ins and blockers for phpBB, BR just need to implement them.

Or in lay-man's terms, theres an app for that.