Use of Key Words on Your Web Site

roy · Guest

Keyword use is an art and takes a lot of research to determine the best words to optimize. There are many sites that offer advice and claim to know the secrets to keyword success. The fact is that search engines are constantly changing the way sites are indexed, so there are no shortcuts to optimize a site. Tools are available to assist with keyword and search engine optimization (SEO) and should be used on a regular basis.

Jim Hutchinson

Rosalind Gardner

Hey Jim,

Our (now deleted) Forum member roy is a wannabe professional forum spammer.

Someone who signs up and starts dropping short tips that are not in response to our valued forum members' question should be our first clue.

A great way to check to see whether he's actually contributing original content is to search Google for the first line of his comment.

In this case, I Googled "Keyword use is an art and takes a lot of research to determine the best words to optimize" and sure enough, the first instance came up in an article at Ezine Articles, NOT authored by roy.

Feel free to delete these forum spammers at will.

Cheers,

Jim Hutchinson

Rosalind Gardner · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 4:37 am Post subject: **Re: Catching forum spammers**

No problem!

Just thought that I'd leave that up and visible for NPT forum members to see so everyone will be able to catch forum spammers in the act on their sites. Smile

Cheers,

chrismonty · Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 9 Location: MD

Ah, another one bites the dust. When will they learn?

5starAffiliatePrograms · Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 42 Location: The OC

Ros and Jim,

Isn't it SOOOOOOO frustrating? Some days it seems like all we do is delete spam and ban spammers at our forum.

To give you a tip that may help. We've been getting a major increase in spammers from India. They almost always have "other" instead of affiliate or manager in their profile and almost always have US or USA for location. But an IP check shows they are really from India. I'd say 99% of the time if a profile is Other >> USA >> IP India - they will be spammers.

As soon as someone with that type of profile signs up we put them in a moderated group so their posts won't show up in public until we view and approve it and they won't be able to add a sig or profile link either. This at least stops them before they can do any damage publicly.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Rosalind Gardner · Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2008 11:27 pm Post subject:

Hey Linda,

Thanks SO much for the great tip... I'll blog about it in this week's newsletter... and yes, the forum spammer problem is SOOOO frustrating. Why can't everyone just play nice? Smile

Cheers,

chrismonty · Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 9 Location: MD

Hey, that's a great tip. I might have to try that one myself. Thanks!

Johnny · Joined: 17 Dec 2007 Posts: 26

Tejas · Joined: 18 Jun 2008 Posts: 10 Location: California

At the risk of being laughed off this forum, is the whole point of forum spamming just to get backlinks to your site?

Did someone just laugh? Wink

Tejas

Rosalind Gardner

Hi Tejas,

No one's laughing, especially not me.

You're absolutely correct, backlinks are the primary reason for forum spamming, blog comment spam and all that other crap that we have to constantly be on the lookout for.

I've contemplated disallowing links on the forum altogether, but that would just be punishing the good guys (the vast majority of our forum members) for the sake of a few idiots... so we'll just keep up the moderation. Smile

Cheers,
Ros

khuether · Joined: 14 Jul 2008 Posts: 13

Yikes! That's a bit frustrating. How unfortunate. I don't understand why people bother spamming. I've been deleting spam in various places all day! Waste of time.