Another form of link spam: forum & blog user lists

by Sapphire (February 1, 2006)

I discovered today that someone had signed up to a forum on one of my sites using a porn search term as their name, and putting a porn URL in their user profile under their “homepage”. That’s an outbound link, the same as any other. And, if you search for one of your own forum or blog names on Google, you’ll find that your user profile pages come up. That meant a page of my site was now going to come up when someone searched for that porn term.

If you run any sort of community where people can sign up as members, check it periodically to make sure all of your member profiles link to decent sites. If not, you have two options. Delete the user, banning their IP, email address, website and anything else your software allows you to ban - that’s what I did in this case, since it was so obvious the person wasn’t a real user. If it does seem to be a real user, and yet they’ve linked to porn or gambling or something else unsavory (and actually, I find it a little hard to imagine legit users doing that), just delete the URL from their user profile and leave the member intact. It’s a good idea to post your restrictions somewhere visible - what people are and aren’t allowed to link to. Then, if they argue with you, you just point them to your rules.

Posted in Blogging, SEO, Traffic
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