Little Trick I Use

Discussion in 'Managing Your Online Community' started by AWS, Jan 14, 2012.

  1. AWS

    AWS Administrator

    Joined:
    Feb 1, 2010
    Messages:
    1,616
    Likes Received:
    692
    Location:
    Joliet, IL U.S.A.
    First Name:
    Bob
    There is a little trick I use when a member signs up just to get a backlink by replying to a thread with a one line comment and leaving a link to their site.

    This is a commonly used spam tactic and unless you have a restrictive user group for new members like we have setup here you'll get hit by this.

    The trick I use is to edit the link and replace their URL with an internal link to my community. Most of these links are keyword stuffed specific to their site. These keywords are irrelevant to the content of my communities so they offer little or no value, but, if I can get just one of these spammers users to hit my link instead of theirs then it's worth the effort. A side effect of this is that for some of these keywords on sites where I have been doing it for a while I actually rank higher than the spammer does with his own site.

    Now that's what I call beating a spammer at his own game. Just thought I'd share that with you.
     
    AWS, Jan 14, 2012
    #1
    2 people like this.
  2. thecodecage.com

    thecodecage.com Regular Member

    Joined:
    Oct 23, 2010
    Messages:
    16
    Likes Received:
    0
    Thats great if you have the time to keep an eye on them and edit links, personally in my forums they cannot post a link until they pass a threshold of x posts, granted you do get the odd organic spammer who will post nonsense to beat the threshold but they're usually picked up by the mods very quickly :)

    That said i may just even spend a bit of effort in future doing just that :)
     
    thecodecage.com, Jan 16, 2012
    #2
  3. TSUFanatic

    TSUFanatic Regular Member

    Joined:
    Sep 22, 2010
    Messages:
    240
    Likes Received:
    16
    On a forum I used to post at, they didn't let users post links until they had 25 or something similar to that amount of posts. The result is it was a huge success and the new members weren't allowed to start threads until they had 10 posts or similar...
     
    TSUFanatic, Jan 19, 2012
    #3

Share This Page