Some kind of SEO exploit?

Same 4-5 users seem to have recently registered on forums all over the net

[Looie]

I run a rather small and completely unknown web page for an online guild. A permanently "under construction" home page, a few outdated static pages and one phpBB forum. The only people who visit are guild members, so I know each and every new user.

Last week, I noticed a strange "Latest registered user": <snip>. His profile contained only his email (<snip>) and a link to his web site (<snip>). Like everyone else, I hate spam and mass marketing and this reeked of it, but I let it go for a while. A few days later I had 3 more new users: '<snip>', '<snip>' and '<snip>' all with marketing related tidbits in their profile.

This was too much for a coincidence, so I tried Googling some of the names. To my surprise, these four users seem to have all registered together as new users on forums all over the internet, all in the recent days (all the hits are from "Latest new user"-type lines).

This looks like a not-so-subtle way to put free links back to specific home pages on all forum memberlists that are indexed by Google. What is this trick? Maybe it's an old classic, what's it called? Links to details would be welcome.

[edited by: engine at 8:56 am (utc) on Oct. 22, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[rfung]

This looks like a not-so-subtle way to put free links back to specific home pages on all forum memberlists that are indexed by Google. What is this trick? Maybe it's an old classic, what's it called? Links to details would be welcome.

You describe the 'trick' in all its glory right there. It's all about having inbound links... I don't know if there's a specific name to it though.

[Zygoot]

I have the same problem on my forum. Dozens of registered users with strange names and links to websites.

[followgreg]

Well that's part of the game Google make them do, hopefully something better than ranking using inbound links will come out some day.

[victor]

In the forums I run, the user's home page is not revealed to Google. You have to be logged in to see that. And, if you don't post anything in the first few days, the new id automaticly expires.

WMW does something similar. The home page in your profile is not shown until your post count reaches a high number.

With both these methods, drive-by sign-ups do nothing but waste the time of the spammer.

[Dave_A]

That sounds to me rather like "Guest book!" bombing, where people sign up or leave a message in a guest book so that some search engines pick up the domain name part of there email address as a link.

[Tsuren]

Looie, first of all: is it bothering you? Do you have to pay for each users to someone? I have phpbb on my site but I do not care about my memberlist.

If you want to get rid of ths problem use picture code.
If you cannot do it so just add a field in a registration form. Use one picture with some figures and check what people fill there out. You know that the code always the same but spammer does not want to waste his time for your humble forum. :)

You can rename fields of your form. Spammer uses a bot which cannot be able to fill the form out properly. PHPBB rejects application wich does not have @ in email's field.

There are plenty ways to stop memberlist spam. But... who cares?