? Ethical to scam the spam - forum profiles

I'll continue to outsource my profile link building, and you can go ahead and do that, won't hurt my feelings. If you want to waste your time, go right ahead! I think if you're that concerned about it, then manually approve registration. And it isn't like I do a lot of profile link building, I personally don't think it is very effective. I just think it is a lost cause honestly. I'm sure google will completely devalue these links in the future.

Well I'm encouraged to see that I am not the only Warrior who no longer wants to participate in littering up the internet highway with links to our websites. A few months ago I came up with a new backlink strategy. I have about 7 forums -- PR 4 to PR8 that I participate in, where I write REAL forum posts and have my signature point to one or more of the websites I'm promoting.

Funny thing is, once I changed to this strategy, there is one forum that I post to where a lot of people follow my signature link to my website. Mosts of my posts are not related to the website I'm promoting, but I guess when people think you have just said something truly interesting, they are eager to hear more.

I make sure I go and add at least one post (again, a helpful comment) to each of my forums each week. It's like depositing a bit of the paycheck in the bank and I no longer need to feel ashamed of leaving my links cluttering up someone else's site, pretending to be a real member.

I can also confirm from my experience that profile backlinks are not very effective. They are only good for loooong tail and low competition keywords. And most of those are useless anyway.

I also have the same vermin, who repeatedly return no matter how many times you ban them, promoting the same crap sites, rather than fight them, they can go into my thank you group, i can edit the profile, the signature and then have some real fun and become creative with the bad word filter and use that to edit out those links they hide within the lines of jumbled to text crap to links of more favorable destinations.

I can then let these drummer boys post all day, all they will be doing is building links for worthy causes, karma does come back to some

Yes, I'm with you. Actually, anyone out there who could write a script for the most popular forum software? Sounds like a great idea!

All the very best, Allen

A small update, in a very small way some spammers are now completely wasting their time, with the use of the censored word settings, i now have a rapidly growing list for those extra special lovely people who come back no matter what. The good thing is now i just censor the words but more to the destination URLs and the whole lot is wiped out and a waste of space and time for them.

every one now is completely wasting their time and the loser's are those being sucked into paying for this wasted service, and yet they still come, lambs to slaughter the lot of them.

The problem with profile links is the fact that there are only so many forums in existence on the web. With the development of sophisticated new tools most marketers are working off the same list of forums. So if you're a forum running non manual reviews of new sign ups you are going to be snowed under. Your forum will eventually get found by scrapebox. When it does you're toast. Or you move to a manual review system. That's just the way it is and there is nothing anyone anywhere can do about it.

Stopping actual spam posts is another problem you'll have to face too as a forum owner. I know a lot of folks do not make a distinction between profile links and forum spam but I believe there is a difference. Absolutely no one looks at the profiles of new members. Adding a link to a page that gets very little traffic seems harmless enough. But attempting to post a spam thread on that same forum is sort of like trying to invade the main floor of the forum.

There is a difference between the two if you look for it.

But I do have some hopeful news for those of you who hate profile links with a passion. Way back when xrumer came out the consensus was to submit your profile links and then wait for the search engine crawlers to find them in order to look much more natural to them. The problem is it can take months for a profile link to be found this way. So impatient people invented a way to ping the links to "help" the crawlers locate the links on the web. The problem with doing so is the fact that if you're taking 3000 profile links and pinging them then the crawlers would find them all at once. But doing this didn't hurt marketers mainly because the crawlers ignore a major portion of ping requests they receive. So most of the profile links when pinged are still ignored by the crawlers leaving them to be found later in a more natural manner. But now folks are taking their profile links and creating rss feeds for them. After that they set automated software to continue pinging the rss feed every hour on the hour until Google actually responds and crawls the link. The end result? Google is finding all the profile links much, much faster. Maybe even as much as 1000 times faster. As this continues I am certain all the link juice generated from these forum profile pages will become absolutely worthless. Especially given the fact that everyone is using the same list of forums to link from. In fact the reduction in juice has already started. Give it a little while longer and profile links will be dead forever. You have my word on it.

Quite a thought. But i would rather concentrate on quality backlinks than rely on possibly poor quality links that will end up doing more harm than good. You know the story with link neighborhoods and how they can hurt you.

Regards
Dann Vicker

I suppose you could do something like that. I usually just delete them.