Fighting link spam

People who add their links with no intention of linking back

[Webdetective]

I've been having a real problem with link spammers adding their junk links to my sites with clearly no intention of linking back. Unfortunately, my linking system has no way of checking for reciprocal links, so I have to check them manually.

There is one or possibly more link spammers evidently operating out of the UK, since their link titles are usually always the names of British cities and regions Ie: London, Essex, Suffolk, Leeds, East Anglia, etc... This party always leaves the reciprocal link box blank. At this point all I can do is delete the junk links from my database manually, but this is time consuming. Fortunately, the links do not become active until I approve them, but still, my links database quickly fills up with these unwanted junk links.

[whitehatwizard]

Arelis can do this for you and Im sure plenty of other software. I think some members have their own scripts or you'll need to write your own (if you can). Even if you review the site and find a link, you want to be able to check your links 1 month later to check they are still there (sadly they often arent).

[tigger]

I had a clean up last week and nuked 35% of all my links daft thing is some of the muppets were only offering PR1/2 links pages and my links going back were PR4/5 - fools

[Marketing Guy]

Don't use any link managers, but have noticed a rise in cheeky link requests - ie, can you link to my .edu client on your PR5 link page and I'll link back to you from random-crap-site-with-PR1.info....

Spammers? In the UK? Neva! We're British don't you know? ;)

[rakesh mosaic]

Would it be possible for you to check in your submission form for the Reciprocal link textbox to be empty or not.

This would help you a bit.

Eventually you will need to get a Recoprocal link check codeing integrated into your submission form to avoid further headache..

[Webdetective]

The linking script I'm using is a commercial product I paid for a few years ago, but they have not released any updates for a long time to address these problems. It unfortunately has no automatic reciprocal link checking. It's all manual.

Major modifications to this script could be possible, except I know extremely little about CGI or PERL programming. I have been able to make minor changes to scripts including this one, but nothing major.

I have thought about Arelis, but I would need something that can replace exactly what I am using now, and be able to create .shtml pages since that's what I am using now, and something with a one-time purchase price and NO monthly fees. I decided long ago not to use any links management services. For one thing they charge steep monthly fees.

No, there are no reciprocal links in any of these junk links. They leave it blank, and this linking script doesn't require it to be filled in.

Thanks,
Fred

[PatrickDeese]

I would guess that you could probably modifiy it fairly easily.

There are several JS scripts that you could use to check required fields.

[Phil_AM]

A bit off topic, but I was hoping someone could answer this for me...

Lets pretend my site is www.Widget.com, and I've gone out and created 50 partnerships with high traffic PR sites. The link they use to get to me though is :

www.Widget.com/index.cfm?sourceid=1

Would my www.Widget.com homepage still get the credit for that link?

[da_pinky]

i had the same problem with one of my pages, where eveyone can add a link. after a while some spammers discovered the site to fill it with viagra, mortage and casino sites.
i think the best thing you can do about is to setup a filter in your favorite language:

-write the description or linktext into a new var
-remove all spaces in this var
-replace 1337 captals (1->l, 0->o, rn->m, ...)
-now check this var for banned words (casino, viaga etc.) and reject submission if one of this strings is present.