gethan - 7:21 am on Aug 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

> Certainly a lesson on the need to take moderation seriously.

Yes - though even with good moderation something slipped through on an area I wasn't expecting.

> Always helps to make registartion a little more difficult too.

That's a also a problem - you then deter legitimate users too.

> But It really is dangerous to make assumptions about the causes of the problem.

Erm disagree - what could happen from making an assumption? - maybe google will drop all my pages from their index... oh, that's already happened.

> you say you have 9000 incoming links;

Around 9000 - organic links, probably 200 alone due to being featured in the NYT - yes this is a BIG established site... no link schemes, 9000 is not too many - see link:webmasterworld.com

> What about all the other member-installed links? I'd think quite seriously about nofollow.

The pages that caused this problem (probably) didn't have any out going links - just failed attempts at linking out due to using BBCode - the problem is the ~10K IBL from guestbooks, forums, comments pages that I have no control of.

> this has nothing to do with moderation.

It does a little in our case - if we'd spotted the pages before the the spammer started creating the IBLs then maybe he wouldn't of bothered - but then again someone else would have.

> Spammers create forums, blogs, web pages on our host, then they start spamming OUR urls (which automatically get redirected using some encoded javascript method) to thier pharmancy/casino/porn link sites.

In this case - my site is the host. But other than that - yes that's what happens everyday - and everyday thousands and thousands of attempts are blocked or caught by moderators. *sigh* - pharmancy/casino/porn - the big threee.

> Google has a serious flaw in their algorithm to allow such abuse to hurt popular websites like ours.

Agreed - is my only option to locate the spammers and request the same treatment of my competitors sites in order to level the playing field?

Fortunately my site is popular enough that it's still growing, still gaining traffic - purely from word of mouth.

24th: slight change in status - the ibls no longer show when doing link:example.com