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> We were swamped recently with spam when our page rank recently hit 6 (I guess spammers target sites with higher PR) We have really good search engine ranking

> We were swamped recently with spam when our page rank recently hit 6 (I guess spammers target sites with higher PR) We have really good search engine rankings and if you post a topic on our forum you'll be available in all the search engine results within minutes. The funniest thing I've ever experienced was discovering when a spammer will submit a post about a live stream for a football match 15 minutes before kick off that we'll see ~3,000 people browsing the forum all from google because they searched "watch barcelona vs real madrid" and our ranking is being abused by spam bots. Prior to realising that this happened I'd always viewed spam on forums as a sort of "hope people click the links" thing but after discovering just how much traffic people like those mentioned in my example can drive... these spammers must be making a lot of money. The forums are used as their quick way to get into search results for a term they know is about to blow up, I think it's pretty clever and obvious in hindsight. http://rmbls.net/post/21518498093/barcelona-vs-real-madrid http://rmbls.net/post/21518498093/barcelona-vs-real-madrid

TomGullen 14y ago
We have that as well, and ranked very highly for some long tails all relating to live sports events. However, it is our opinion that the traffic these links generate is fake (and we have some evidence for it as well). I think it's aim is to trick Google into thinking it's a good quality result, or alternatively the links often are very heavy in adverts so the fake traffic routed via Google, your website and finally the spammers website could be used to generate lots of fake ad clicks in a semi realistic way. That's our conspiracy theory anyway, I very rarely see real world examples of content on the web being ranked so well so quickly and driving so much traffic in such a short space of time. As a small unscientific test when a seemingly popular spam sports event thread was posted, I deleted it and created a duplicate under my account. It didn't get any traffic at all. This in some way helps validate my suspicions that the traffic being driven is not a result of Google's process, but is artificial. I was going to write a blog post about it but never got round to it!
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Hm, that sounds like a plausible theory. I've never investigated beyond looking at the locations via google analytics and they always seemed to be European visitors (Spain was the majority) which I assumed meant the traffic was legitimate because the football matches of interest match up. Next time it happens I'll look up some of the IP addresses used and see if they match any known spammers, although I suspect if they are doing some sort of click fraud they'd be using bot nets?

TomGullen 14y ago

We have that as well, and ranked very highly for some long tails all relating to live sports events. However, it is our opinion that the traffic these links generate is fake (and we have some evidence for it as well). I think it's aim is to trick Google into thinking it's a good quality result, or alternatively the links often are very heavy in adverts so the fake traffic routed via Google, your website and finally the spammers website could be used to generate lots of fake ad clicks in a semi realistic way. That's our conspiracy theory anyway, I very rarely see real world examples of content on the web being ranked so well so quickly and driving so much traffic in such a short space of time. As a small unscientific test when a seemingly popular spam sports event thread was posted, I deleted it and created a duplicate under my account. It didn't get any traffic at all. This in some way helps validate my suspicions that the traffic being driven is not a result of Google's process, but is artificial. I was going to write a blog post about it but never got round to it!

citricsquid 14y ago
Hm, that sounds like a plausible theory. I've never investigated beyond looking at the locations via google analytics and they always seemed to be European visitors (Spain was the majority) which I assumed meant the traffic was legitimate because the football matches of interest match up. Next time it happens I'll look up some of the IP addresses used and see if they match any known spammers, although I suspect if they are doing some sort of click fraud they'd be using bot nets?