Forum spam gets organized

April 11th, 2008 by Steve Gerencser

Spammers are a crafty bunch, a crafty bunch that may need to be crushed under heel at some point, but crafty non-the-less.

It all started with a simple need. Getting links. At first it was about getting friends to link to you, or joining a webring. Then it was trading links with other people whether you liked them or not. That was soon followed by submitting your website to hundreds of directories, free and paid. But what happened when you needed thousands of links submitted? Simple, you outsource it like everything else. $50 gets you 1000 link submissions!

Well, it seems like making money submitting websites to directories isn’t as lucrative as it once was. Take a look at this email Dave over at ChainzOnline got, I assume by mistake.

Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 23:01:53 +0300
From: SEO Company <info@seo4experts.com>
To:
Subject: Looking for Link Builder. Job Offer.

Hi,

We are a SEO company. We are looking to hire several link builders.

We want you to build links from forums. NOTE: we do NOT need any other type of links. Please do NOT reply to this email with your offers of other kinds of links. Thanks.

We’ve got a list of ~1,000 computer & software related forums. We want you to make 3 posts on each forum regularly. You will need to put a link in your signature. We want to hire you for a long period of time (month, year, several years++).

For how much are you ready to do this kind of work? How much do you want per forum? [UTF-8?](You’ll need to make 3 posts on each forum.)

We are sending out this email to several hundreds of Indian link builders in order to find the cheapest price. So please make as low quote as you can.

Who we want to find:

a) responsible person who wants to work
b) a person with good English
c) a person who knows how to make posts on forums

Please reply to this email if you are interested.

Thanks,
SEO Company

Here is a company spamming to find spammers that we can thank for a lot of the new spam heading our way. No link for you ( http://www.forumlinkbuilding.com/view.php/forum_link_building_service ). Take a look at this quote from their page:

Unique: We will build links to your website using forums. We will create 3 posts on each forum linking to your website from 3 different pages. We never spam forums.

They “never” spam forums yet they create accounts specifically to get three posts with links in them? Isn’t this spam? I’m sure we can all go on for hours about these types of “people”, but they won’t care. So what to do about it?

Over at WebWorkshop we set it up so that you need 50 posts to get any live links or sigs at all. And I talked with a mod at WebProWorld and they also instituted a min post count to get sig links. And I suspect that most other forums will do the same to help stem the flood of low income workers spamming our forums with “I like what you said” or “Hi, I’m from New York” via an India IP address posts.

I think my new hobby will be contacting all these companies that hire these guys and ask them why they are spamming our forums. Hmmmm, possible client recruitment potential. Forget that last part, you don’t need those clients.