Profile Spam... bad?

I think spam in profile doesn't do much for SEO, but people still do it. You should make them verify their emails and make registration a little harder to prevent spammers.

sometimes profile spam can helps you to get good PR of your new forum, once you get good PR, delete last year's profiles which have 0 post.

spamming as an open black hat seo technique you must not be spamming if you want your website to get high serps in search engines

You should enforce them to verify their email address, before activating their profiles

However i think this way doesn't work, many webmasters are still doing it and after some time they will know that this method doesn't work. You can check new members for some weeks and if they don't post in this period, you can ban them. Its my suggestion for solving this problem.

You can also specify a minimum post no. (10 or 50 or 100) only after which they can have an active signature link

it isn't all bad. Helps with the member count

so bad. . for spamming !

Unless the linking is to porn/gambling/pharma type sites than no the linking isn't bad. It helps with the member count. Many of them will in fact be linking to their profile pages (whether to help them get indexed or just to backlink their backlinks), whereby increasing the backlink count to your forum. Also, the more pages on your forum indexed the better in terms of helping the overall authority of your forum.

Tom

I have the same problem on a forum that I set up as an example for customers but now has actual users.

The spammers make duplicate posts which are essentially long lists of electronic goods and phones forsale.

I created an advertiser area and move all their messages in there deleting the duplicates.

It's annoying but as Tom Goodwin pointed out, they could be doing me a service by linking back to my forum - so I don't delete their entire input just in case.

I recently opened up a forum on one of my sites as a test. Within a couple of weeks I had over a thousand users and just as many posts. I was using this as a ploy to get backlinks to my site thinking the spammers would backlink their profiles. It worked in that regards but now I'm ranking on page 1 for about 150 different terms related to porn and I don't like that at all. Because of that I deleted the forum.

I wouldn't worry about profiles initially. Higher member count makes you look good

I would definitely come down hard on spam posts or comments.

Cheers,

Stev

it all depends on which domains you are obtaining these profiles. relevancy, different ips and pr are all very helpful.

Improve the verification process and make registration a little less automated. This should help to reduce the level of spammers. Though it may be considered as mentioned above that having an high number count could be beneficial for you in the start.

If your talking about Links in profile sigs that is one way to get backlinks and its very useful as well

You should let them to leave links (as long as they are regular links and not porn or anything like that...) They wont harm you and they will give you increased number of registered member which will encourage other people, willing to participate in conversations to join your forum.

Whatever. Not the place to get into our concepts of morality including your claims of what is moral or acceptable. All that matters is that to the greater world of commerce it doesn't do anything for a reputable business to be associated with porn. Hate it if you want but those are the facts. Its clear that that was not his niche to begin with. and yes if isn't and it violates his values then it sure would be and is an anything for buck mentality. Its no waste not to want to be associated with it. No side of the issue should be pushing their morality pro or con. Not the place for it.

Furthermore you have already admitted in another famous thread that linking out to such sites can hurt your rankings on Google. And ummm he didn't state what the terms were. There are a lot of terms that even some porn business owners don't like and don't want to be associated with. Again short sighted advice.

Bottom line - there is absolutely no good reason to be criticizing his moral choices in regard to business acumen when those choices are in keeping with maintaining a good reputation with Google and with an overwhelming amount of consumers in most business niches..