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NOFOLLOW is badly needed for this forum now
The spammers became more clever over time: Instead of only posting some nonsense with a link, they now mostly post quite sensible name-related questions together with a link that they want to promote.
It really pains me when spammers are not only able to put up their links here for a few days until Mike weeds them out, but some forum regulars even(mis)take the questions as serious ones and spend some time answering.
No, nobody should answer this guy whether SEO (short for "search engine optimization" for those who don't know) is a "sure name", surname or whatever: That would be only a big waste of time.
I saw that the forum software renders links as normal links, without a rel="nofollow" attribute which would make this forum a lot less interesting for spammers at once.
Now, with full links from a domain so old and so well-ranked by Google, it is worth the trouble for spammers to 1) manually register, 2) come up with some not too-dumb name-related question and 3) post the whole thing.
I even found this forum once as a "tip of the week" on a blackhat website for "getting quality links". There must be more of this, otherwise the spammers wouldn't even know that this is a worthwhile target.
A really sad state of affairs for people genuinely interested in names...
The spammers became more clever over time: Instead of only posting some nonsense with a link, they now mostly post quite sensible name-related questions together with a link that they want to promote.
It really pains me when spammers are not only able to put up their links here for a few days until Mike weeds them out, but some forum regulars even(mis)take the questions as serious ones and spend some time answering.
No, nobody should answer this guy whether SEO (short for "search engine optimization" for those who don't know) is a "sure name", surname or whatever: That would be only a big waste of time.
I saw that the forum software renders links as normal links, without a rel="nofollow" attribute which would make this forum a lot less interesting for spammers at once.
Now, with full links from a domain so old and so well-ranked by Google, it is worth the trouble for spammers to 1) manually register, 2) come up with some not too-dumb name-related question and 3) post the whole thing.
I even found this forum once as a "tip of the week" on a blackhat website for "getting quality links". There must be more of this, otherwise the spammers wouldn't even know that this is a worthwhile target.
A really sad state of affairs for people genuinely interested in names...
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NOFOLLOW is now enabled. The spammers won't immediately realize this however, so it'll probably continue for a while.
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Thank you for the fast implementation! I'll be looking forward to seeing the board get back to normal again. :)
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Thanks, that was fast. I think the news will propagate fast enough.
First I thought that something is not yet quite right because I did not see any "nofollow" attribute at the links themselves, but then I noticed the "robots" meta tag. Elegant, didn't know that one yet!
First I thought that something is not yet quite right because I did not see any "nofollow" attribute at the links themselves, but then I noticed the "robots" meta tag. Elegant, didn't know that one yet!
This message was edited 6/24/2013, 10:34 AM
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It is very sad indeed. :( I also recently noticed, by coincidence, that the boards of BtN are extremely well-crawled by Google. Several days ago, I made a post on one of the forums and when shortly afterwards I googled something related to the content in my post, the post that I had just made was among the search results (either on the 1st or 2nd search result page, I think). This within 5 minutes of having made the post! That's kind of scary. :/
I didn't realise it at the time, but after having just read this post of yours, I understand now what spammers see in this board. Before, I'd be like: "Why here? Isn't this a bit of an obscure place, visitor-wise?". But now I see that, if they post on this board and include a malicious link in their post or signature, the post containing the malicious link will be among Google's top results. :/
I definitely agree that at this point, prevention measures are needed. I can think of a few, though I'm not sure how they would work out in practice. After all, I've never owned a forum, nor have I ever moderated one. I'll let Mike know some of my suggestions, though. :)
I didn't realise it at the time, but after having just read this post of yours, I understand now what spammers see in this board. Before, I'd be like: "Why here? Isn't this a bit of an obscure place, visitor-wise?". But now I see that, if they post on this board and include a malicious link in their post or signature, the post containing the malicious link will be among Google's top results. :/
I definitely agree that at this point, prevention measures are needed. I can think of a few, though I'm not sure how they would work out in practice. After all, I've never owned a forum, nor have I ever moderated one. I'll let Mike know some of my suggestions, though. :)
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