InBoxRevenge KS Forum

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/20 ... ebspam.ars




SiL

This is definitely having an undesirable impact on these forum spammers.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the roll out of "Penguin", the Google search algorithm update.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 02494.html

The article interviews someone running a legitimate business, not someone flooding thousands of abandoned forums with bogus "content" in the hopes of drumming up fake page rankings.

The funny part is, forum spammers are now complaining that they have to generate, you know, actual valid content for a link to actually be seen as valid by Google. Some spammers in many of the blackhat marketing forums are reporting a drop of 65 - 80% in their "traffic." This is extremely good news. Many of them say they had to start 100% from scratch, getting all new domains and setting up completely new infrastructure to get things rolling again, and even after that: they still don't get the page rankings they were used to.

This is a really significant update to Google. I'm intrigued to see what the "blackhat" morons try next.

Of course this has now resulted in an underground market for "penguin-busting" SEO. (Which I guess means: just decent content, linked to appropriate urls, which back up that content.)

My suggestion for a 2.0 version of penguin would be a correlation between the SEO terms being promoted and the page title, so for example no page that had a page title of "Arthritis Recovery Group" or "Vintage Auto Collectors" and had search terms like "free porn" or "viagra", or something more specific like "fen375", "fen 375" or "fen 375 buy now" would never get any page rank. Like: zero. None. Ever.

This is already on the way to nipping that in the bud, but something that specifically targeted that kind of setup would uttery decimate the forum spamming industry.

By the way maybe that's a valid update for all forum software. Mark a user as a spammer and automatically change the page title to something utterly meaningless, and include completely bogus meta-data on any page that their posts or their profile ever shows up on.

Aside: it is safe to say that none of the accounts which are still routinely attempting to auto-register to this forum will ever get a page ranking on Google again. I've done some clandestine digging to see if any of the most frequent Xrumer users urls or search terms result in anything. By and large: no they don't. But you know what does turn up? Their username, in first place, listed as forum spammers. That hasn't changed at all.

SiL

I'd say Google's having success. I tried to find a sample of some forum spam to match some I knew would not remain posted long. (I wanted a more permanent example as evidence for a WOT review.) I could find some cached results, but the posts were gone. And I could find some forums where someone had registered using the same username, but the user was listed as having no posts. There were no examples I could use. Zero.

It appears that if you have a website and you're not scrupulous about removing spammy crap quickly, you're going to have trouble getting indexed by Google.