Forum spam dilemma
A blog reader e-mailed me and asked for advice. She’d just opened a phpBB forum on her site, and had discovered too late that spammers had started posting porn spam posts full of smutty pictures. The spammers then posted the links to those posts on other forums.
She’s now worried her domain name is tarnished because it appears in Google searches along with porn content. So she’s contemplating abandoning her domain name, even though she’s invested a lot of work into it, since it’s also her moniker.
So, apart from abandoning her domain name, what are her options? Some of the posts pointing to her site are on porn forums, so I doubt she could get those posts deleted.
Would it be possible for Google to drop all posts with links to her forum, if she sent Google a list of specific URL’s that appear in their index? Any Google Guy around to answer that one?
Another alternative: Find out how they’re generating the tiny font, then make a filter that removes all phpBB page that contain that particular code in a particular location! BTW, I identified the code, and it’s (I’ve removed the tags, or Wordpress goes nutso): span style font size 1px and line height normal. Could someone give some feedback on where inside a phpBB post that code would be used legitimately?
And since I’m addressing this ball of wax, I’ll also do a short analysis on the spam.
First of all, they include loads of pictures. They’re loading from this site: trafflow.com
If you load that site, you get a message that there’s nothing to see there, and to go on to freerhost.com, which is a free hosting site. Both sites are owned by the same person - previewtgp.com. That e-mail address is on a list of owners of Malware domains. One of his domains are tagged for distributing Zlob.
Below the pictures, there’s a long porn text, and under that is a list of links in tiny font (not human readable) that points to other forum posts where they’ve posted porn.
Under that, there’s a list of links that link to keyword rich URL’s promising different types of video related software. Anything from keygen to porn. Same tiny font.
I’ve checked the domains in these links, and so far they all belong to the same IP subnet (except one), and they’re all connected by whois identity, dns servers or subnet:
207.176.39.228
207.176.39.230
207.176.39.232
207.176.39.235
207.176.39.238
68.178.232.99
Normally, I’ll need to put in a disclaimer, saying that the spammer and owner of the domains may not be one and the same. The same is true here, but I’d like to add one more fact: The non-porn spam links at the bottom of the posts point to page where I’ve found links to trafflow.com.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 am
Try Google’s URL Removal Tool:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61062
That ought to help get the offending posts removed from Google’s index quickly.
She’ll need to stay on top of the spam and ensure that spammy posts are quickly dealt with, before Google gets to see them.
Is there a plugin for phpBB that could include a noindex/nofollow meta tag for the first 5/10 days of a post/thread’s life, so that fresh posts don’t go into search engine lists until they’ve been there a few days? That would mean that, as long as any spammy stuff is caught and deleted within a few days, it won’t get indexed.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:56 am
To David,
Your suggestions are good, but don’t address the fact that the problem was never HER site being indexed, but someone else’s site which contained a porn link to hers. She can use the removal tool to remove spammy pages on her own site after she’s removed the pages, but she can’t use that tool to remove pages from someone else’s site!
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Searching for the domain you’ve mentioned, reveals a lot more affected domains. (Google only shows 650 from the 48,800 results)
October 4th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Google themselves say it shouldn’t hurt…
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014953.html
October 8th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Of course, but if the page that the links pointed to no longer exists, I’d imagine Google will ignore those links from now on.
You can’t prevent anyone from linking to your site, or control what they want to use as link text (except perhaps if it’s libellous, where you may have some legal grounds).
October 12th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
She does not have to worry about the reputation of the website since hardly no-one *human* follows spammy links. However she must keep her forum clean. Her site will not be indexed by search engines high for porn keywords - spammers websites will be always higher. And of course if someone is looking for porn content and is desperate enough to enter her site - it is not the person she would need to worry about.
October 14th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
“span style font size 1px and line height normal. Could someone give some feedback on where inside a phpBB post that code would be used legitimately?”
Actually, before the KS forums at thecarpcstore.com had to go into hiding due to DDoS, we were having fun with those spams that had links to “I feel lucky” Google searches. By including some of the same terms in our posts, we ended up with better position in the Google results, so anyone misguided enough to click on such a link would be taken directly to a page on a forum that could set them straight. Of course, that text was useless for us to read, so we shrunk it to get it out of our way.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
To AlphaCentauri:
That’s a no, then.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
SpamHuntress, I wanted to tell you thank you for opening this topic up for discussion. Spam is a huge problem, not just in my niche of cyberspace, apparently. Hopefully, with awareness-advocates like yourself, whom publish facts, spam can be warded off a bit.
Thanks again
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Well if you do not want the links from Spam ridden forums to acces your forum, human or search engine, set up the 404 in your .htaccess file, for all the negative hosts.
You can use my list for the domain names. Most of them redirects to Porn sites.
But Porn Spammers will still post to your forum unless you using an Anti Spam Mod Filter.