When I launched my first online forum about smartphones, I had little knowledge about SEO and forum spamming. Add to it the fact that the forum was using SMF (an open-source forum-building platform) which had dofollow links all over the forum, and it was a huge target for spammers due to its decent link metrics. I was able to understand how much SEO benefit the spammers got and why tens of hundreds of them used to register for the forum every single day after two long years.

So, here’s how forum spamming happens in a nutshell:

  • Forum spammers tend to use automated link building tools and they don’t usually manually choose your forum. Your forum instead comes up in their search results because it matches some footprint set by them in their automated link building tool. They often use link metric based filters such as a minimum PageRank of X or a minimum Ahrefs Domain Rank of Y. So, if your site has superior link metrics, it’ll also attract more spammers.
  • The registration too is done automatically using that tool and fake name, a randomly generated or template username, and a fake email address. The automated link building tools use captcha cracking algorithms to ensure that they can break at least easy captchas en route to registering successfully in a forum.
  • The spammers leave their URLs (preferably for them with SEO-focused anchor texts) in the ‘Website’ field or any other fields of a usual forum profile.
  • These fake members then stay inactive in the forum forever.

Up until this stage, the harms done by the spammers to your forum are:

  • Your forum’s user experience and reputation suffer due to fake, spammy-looking user profiles created in bulk.
  • Your site may get penalized by search engines for linking out to inappropriate sites using keyword-rich anchor texts, although you as a webmaster didn’t create those links.

If this wasn’t enough already, when I looked into the link profile of the aforementioned forum of mine using Ahrefs, I found something very interesting as well as frightening:

  • The spammers built an additional tier of links (which are usually even spammier in nature) to the fake forum profiles, and those links came from all kinds of sources including sites containing adult materials.
  • These links were created using the very same softwares that had been used to create the fake forum profiles and include links in them. Basically, those softwares keep a list of all the successfully created forum profiles and their URLs and the link builder can build thousands of spammy links to those forum profiles hosted on thousands of different forums in an attempt to increase the link equity of those forum profile pages, trying to get even more link juice flown into the pages that the forum profiles link to.

Now, these links are sure to get your forum hit by Penguin. And disavowing them is largely a waste of time, because as long as spammers are able to keep creating new and new profiles, new and new links will keep getting built to those profiles as well. So, I figured out that the easiest way to save genuine forums from the wrath of Penguin for something they didn’t even engage in themselves, is to stop the spammers in the first place.

Now, it might sound simple, but while it definitely isn’t a piece of cake, it shouldn’t be on a rocket science level either unless your forum software is really non-customizable and has less security features. Here are a few simple ways you can get rid of forum spammers:

  • Set a very tough level of CAPTCHAs during user registration. This eliminates most automated user registrations because most spammers use automated tools for captcha solving, so they can’t crack the captchas if they’re too complicated, but a human still can. Usually, captcha images with a lot of noise and lines and obstructions in them work really well in fending off automated captcha solving tools. But even then, some of the most sophisticated spammers use captcha solving services that leverage real people from mainly third-world countries (because their wages tend to be as low as $1/hour)  for solving captchas in real time. If that is the case, hard captchas won’t work against them, because they’re still people, regardless from third-world countries or not. So, you need to think about something else in this situation, even though you’ll probably have fended off about 95% of the spammers by this time.
  • Removing your forum’s footprints is a great way to prevent your forum from being tracked by the automated link building tools in the first place. Those texts in the footer like “Powered by vBulletin” are one kind of footprints. If there are mods available for your forum software to remove such common footprints, you may want to try that out because it’s highly effective against spammers.
  • You can also use a different type of mods that restrict new users from adding any link anywhere unless they have X number of posts or qualify for any other minimum requirements. This way, even if one or two spammers get in your forum, they won’t be able to add a link!
  • Lastly, you may choose to manually approve user accounts before they’re active and they can edit their data and post in the forums. This is really the last step, and you should only take it (for stopping spammers) if the other three don’t work in stopping 100% of the spammers.

Conclusion

Spam profiles are a very annoying thing for forum admins, and more if your forum has good link metrics. It’s understandable as well because it can be automated, so it’s easy to do — resulting in spammers using it as a quick way to build a good volume of links. The condition gets even worse when the spammers start building an additional tier of links pointing at those forum profiles, essentially creating low-quality, spammy links to your otherwise genuine and clean forum, which may get your forum penalized by the search engines any day.

However, a few simple to intermediate level tweaks can protect your forum from spammers by up to 99%, and if you don’t want to be unsure about that remaining 1% either, manual approval of new user registrations is your last bet.

So, what other ways do you recommend for reducing forum spam? Has it affected the SEO of your own forum?