Escort Ad's every night?

[Carl Thibodeaux]

Just curious, but where do they come from?

Why advertise on the forums?

I know it's all SPAM, but why here?

[Carl Thibodeaux]

Just curious, but where do they come from?

Why advertise on the forums?

I know it's all SPAM, but why here?

[Cerise Sorbet]

This forum's contents get picked up very quickly by Google, for example it already has this thread indexed. That's what those spammers covet.

[Merlin Swordthain]

Simple answer really... besides a lazyness to read what the forums are for ... mostly its just they will spam till someone tells them not to then make another account and do it again because they simply don't care...    Sorry to be so blunt but ..  truth is truth.

[Phil Deakins]

This is exactly why they do it....

The biggest single factor in search engine rankings is links to pages - inbound links. Although Google wasn't the first engine to incorporate links in their rankings algorithm, they were the first to give them such a huge weight. In fact, they describe their links evaluating system (PageRank) as the heart of their system.  When Google then became so popular, and produced much better results than the other engines, the other engines followed suit. Search engines treat a link to a page as a vote for the page, and the clickable link text is attributed to the target page - and weighs heavily in its favour. The more inbound links, from good sources, that a webpage has, the higher in the rankings it will be.

Forum link spammers aren't interested in forum users. They are only interested in the pages where they put their links being indexed by the search engines. When they are indexed, the target pages have more inbound links and, therefore, do better in the rankings. Forums are easy places to place their links, so they auto-post in thousands of forums. Many will be removed, of course, and will do them no good, but some will be missed and improve the rankings.

The type of spam that is most likely to be missed, and achieve the best results, is not the myriad of threads, like the 'Mumbai' ones. It's the apparently normal post that, when it's slipped down and out of sight, is completely altered to contain link spam. There's an example on the first page of threads right now - it got necro-posted to so it popped up to the top again. The original post was quite normal, but later it was changed to be pure spam. Many forums will miss that type and the spammer is successful. [ETA: the thread has now been removed so don't go looking for it. It was missed and was working very well for the spammer but another link-spammer necro-posted to it which caused it to be seen in all its altered glory, and now it is gone] Good forum systems have an option to disallow the editing of posts after a certain period of time has elapsed, so that type of spam can't be done. But many forums do allow it, including this one, and spamming in them works.

[jwenting]

don't forget blogs that don't lock comments after a short while, which regularly end up collecting a large collection of such spam posts as comments to old threads hardly anyone ever reads any more (including the blog owner who thus has no idea his blog is abused as a spam link haven).

[Phil Deakins]

Yes, blogs are another target. I remember Google doing something about links from blogs. It's in the back of my mind that they stopped indexing those links but I may mistaken. They certainly do all they can to combat 'wrong' links in their index, and no doubt the other major engines do the same.

 

Just out of interest, the same applied here in SL when LL used Google's mini-engine. Link spam was successful here too. I know because I made use of it to push my own parcels up the rankings and also the parcels of some competitors up the rankings. At one time I was responsible for 8 of the top 10 rankings for one important searchterm, and most of them were competitors. The reason I did that was to push one particular competitor down the rankings, which I did very successfully. And it was all done with links to their parcels' pages. I've no idea if links still have the same sort of power with the engine that LL uses now, because I stopped taking an interest a long time ago, but I imagine that they have some power because I can't imagine anyone writing an engine these days without giving inbound links some significant power.

[Dillon Levenque]

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

This is exactly why they do it....

The biggest single factor in search engine rankings is links to pages - inbound links. Although Google wasn't the first engine to incorporate links in their rankings algorithm, they were the first to give them such a huge weight. In fact, they describe their links evaluating system (PageRank) as the

heart

of their system.  When Google then became so popular, and produced much better results than the other engines, the other engines followed suit. Search engines treat a link to a page as a vote for the page, and the clickable link text is attributed to the target page - and weighs heavily in its favour. The more inbound links, from good sources, that a webpage has, the higher in the rankings it will be.

Forum link spammers aren't interested in forum users. They are only interested in the pages where they put their links being indexed by the search engines. When they are indexed, the target pages have more inbound links and, therefore, do better in the rankings. Forums are easy places to place their links, so they auto-post in thousands of forums. Many will be removed, of course, and will do them no good, but some will be missed and improve the rankings.

The type of spam that is most likely to be missed, and achieve the best results, is not the myriad of threads, like the 'Mumbai' ones. It's the apparently normal post that, when it's slipped down and out of sight, is completely altered to contain link spam. There's an example on the first page of threads right now - it got necro-posted to so it popped up to the top again. The original post was quite normal, but later it was changed to be pure spam. Many forums will miss that type and the spammer is successful. 

[ETA: the thread has now been removed so don't go looking for it. It was missed and was working very well for the spammer but another link-spammer necro-posted to it which caused it to be seen in all its altered glory, and now it is gone]

 Good forum systems have an option to disallow the editing of posts after a certain period of time has elapsed, so that type of spam can't be done. But many forums do allow it, including this one, and spamming in them works.

---

I think it might have been RIC'd.

[Phil Deakins]

I've no doubt that it was, Dillon.