Forum admins and bloggers: You need to delete user accounts linking to Backlinksforum.com

Backlinksforum.com is an extremely disreputable Website that encourages Web spammers to use unethical "link building" methods to create links to their Websites. These unethical methods include creating fake user accounts on blogs and forums and dropping links to low-quality and/or malicious Websites in member profiles.



The link dropping problem has become so bad that Google announced it may start penalizing Websites that allow these kinds of links to remain in their member profile pages.

Tom Goodwin, a moderator at Backlinksforum.com, used some spam software to create a fake account at SF-Fandom that complied with rules of the "link building" contest that Backlinksforum.com is presently running. The members compete in this contest by using your blogs and forums for their links. One of the rules requires that they link back to their member profile pages on Backlinksforum.com.

Here are some suggestions for you to review if you operate a blog or forum where people can create user accounts:

• Delete ALL user accounts whose member profiles link back to backlinksforum.com
  
• Modify your robots.txt file to block search engine crawlers from indexing your member profile pages (you can just put "Disallow: *profile* if you don't know exactly how to do this)
  
• Turn on all confirming functions that help your forums and blogs verify user accounts, including email confirmation and use of CAPTCHA images
  
• Ban all domain names that are associated with these member profile accounts so they cannot be used to create new accounts
  
• Look for any user profiles that include the word "man" in any profile field like "interests" -- this is an indication that the user account was created with software
  
• Delete ALL user accounts that are awaiting confirmation after 1 day
  
• Delete ALL user accounts that have 0 post counts and which were registered with odd looking domain names
  

I have written more about Web spam and how to fight it through the years at SEO Theory. You can read the Web Spam category to find those articles that deal specifically with Web spammers. Tom Goodwin and his filthy link spamming friends are the lowest of the low on the Web. Do not do business with these people. Do not turn to them for link building advice. Do not try to learn search engine optimization from them. The link building techniques that Backlinksforum.com advocates are unethical and unacceptable.
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