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A “spambot” is an automated program that is used to find discussion forums with the aim of registering and posting a pre-defined post.  The purpose of this is to use forum profiles, signatures and post to add links to back to the owner’s site.

As we know, there are areas of link building that are deemed to be “unethical” and this is one of them.  Automated posts are a nuisance for forum administrators who need to take the time to review posts and moderate (edit or delete) inappropriate posts.  Plus, many sites which use spambots for link building are in highly competitive areas (such as casinos, porn or pharmaceuticals) which can lead to users of the forum being exposed to inappropriate content.

Spambots tend to target specific types of forums, so as an addition to our SEO tips section, I thought I would add some advice on protection your phpBB forum from spambots.

Tips to protect your phpBB forum from spambots

• Don’t allow guests (unregistered users) to post.
• Update phpBB and activate captcha authorisation (done via config in admin panel). This displays a random image (with text in it) during the registration process that users need to type in to register. Not a problem for humans but bots have trouble with it.
• Remove memberlist.php (or replace it with a blank page). A lot of spam bots go unnoticed because they simply register and use profile URL to get their link. Removing memberslist.php doesn’t stop them but it screws them which is almost as good!
• Delete or alter the phpBB reference in the footer - some spam bots use search engines to find this string of text to select targets. Doesnt stop all bots (some work from a list of existing forum URLs). You can check if this is happening via referral stats.
• Add a new variable to registration process - a simple question with toggle box answer - “are you human?” yes / no. Bots are pre-programmed for standard forum setup so will hit a wall with this.
• Use swearword filter to censor certain phrases - URLs of sites that spam and common spam words (porn, casino, viagra, etc). Wordpress has a nice list of spam words (http://codex.wordpress.org/Spam_Words).
• Activate admin authorisation of new users. A little time consuming to do for busier forums though.

Hope this helps.  It is important to take action against forum and blog comment spam - the less effective we can make it for the spammers, the less likely they are to do it.

Just wanted to do a quick post on some SEO Myths for our SEO tips section.  A bit of a personal grudge of mine - the SEO industry is full on dis-information, so just wanted to clarify a few things.

• Linking to Google does not help your search engine rankings.
• Writing bad code for your site does not negatively effect your rankings (unless the code makes it unindexable).
• Sites hosted on the same server do not impact each other.  While it can be a factor if you are doing some naughty stuff (like running a network of spam sites), the average webmaster doesn’t need to worry.
• Publishing your address details on every page of your site does not count as duplicate content.
• You do not need to submit your site to search engines at all, let alone on a monthly basis. Search engines find sites by following links from other sites.  Get links to your site and search engines will find it eventually.
• Links from .edu and .gov domains are better.  Semi-true - they aren’t treated any differently by search engines, but naturally have much higher “link popularity” so a link from these sites can count for a little more as a result.

It’s important to remember when reading information on discussion forums (and indeed blogs), to take the information with a pinch of salt.  Not everything that shines is gold!

At eFlaunt, we make every effort to comment on issues with authority - we have enough experience in this industry to be able to sort the facts from the speculation.  However, if you disagree with any comments made here, then please feel free to leave your own comment and let us know.

The second installment of our SEO tips section, this entry looks at bad links, also known as “unethical link building”.

Link building is an important aspect of search engine optimisation - a large weight is given to links pointing to your site by search engines - this means that the links to your site can impact your search engine rankings.

Although not all links are “good” for your site, it should be noted that it is very difficult for someone to abuse this by pointing lots of “bad” links to your site - ie your competitors can’t get your banned or penalised.

So what are “bad” links?

Bad links are those that search engines refer to as “coming from bad neighborhoods”.  This is a reference to an earlier age in search engine optimisation where SEOs would setup an entire network of sites, all of which would link to each other and boost each other’s search engine rankings.

Search engines have since implemented measures to identify these “link networks” and as such getting links from a spam network could associate your site with it.

These blatant techniques should be avoided as they simply have no long term benefit for your business.

Shades of grey

Not all links are bad - some are just not very good for your site.  For example, techniques like mass article distribution may seem like an easy way to build lots of links to your site, but the relative effectiveness of this technique is very low.

Think about it logically - your article is duplicated over many websites, all of which basically have the same content - very dry and generic stuff.  Why would a link from these pages carry much weight with search engines (ie, compared to a link from a large news website)?

A lot of sites that publish duplicated content are considered to be of a very low quality as they automatically publish material with no editorial control.

The issues lies with mass press release distribution (online), which also has the issue that many releases are distributed via RSS feeds - meaning that there are some short term links to your site, which fade away over time (as RSS feeds tend to only display x amount of recent items).

However, the shade of grey arises when these techniques offer good traffic - people who are interested in what you had to say and want to visit your site.  So there is room for “grey” techniques, but it shouldn’t form the focus of your link building campaign.

Some link building tips

• Don’t focus on one particular “technique” - a broad strategy using many techniques is much more effective.
• Don’t simply copy what other people do - there’s an insane amount of people out there that don’t know what they are doing!
• Keep it relevant - try to get links from similar or related sites.  So if you are a recruitment agency, then look to get links from career advice websites, etc.
• Generic sites (eg directories) can be good for links to, but shouldn’t be relied on.
• Deep links (links that point directly to internal pages on your site) are useful, but shouldn’t be sought at the expensive of other link building techniques.

eFlaunt offer a completely ethical link building service, making use of our years of experience in the SEO industry.  Contact us for more information.

MG