Spammers signing up only to post content from other websites?

[webgeek247]

Hey,

Has anyone else had bots or spammers signing up only to post content from other websites?

The only reason to do this is to affect SERPs rankings.

We have the following on our rules page at https://forums.hosting/help

VERY IMPORTANT: Do not repost content from different sites to increase your post count as it just causes duplicate content. By copying content from other sites and reposting it to our forum creates a lot of duplicate content which is not suitable for SEO reasons. Instead, you should create unique content or at the very least reword/explain something differently. Failure to do so may result in your account being permanently banned.

We continuously get signups only to post duplicate content from other sites which are very annoying. It seems as though someone is doing it to affect rankings for our forum in a negative way. Sure, they are posting content related to the exact question, but the content is just copied from other sites. I don't think bot automation can do that, so it seems to be done manually by someone to cause harm to the forum with Google rankings.

It is easy to spot by just googling some of the paragraphs of text that is posted and sure enough, it's taken from some other site.

What can we do about it?

[In Omnibus]

Since it's copyright infringement (not fair use) I would report it to their ISP.

You could also make it impossible for new users to post links. I've seen sites create a usergroup promotion so that a member has to post a certain number of times before they are promoted to a usergroup that has link posting privileges.

[Wayne Luke]

If you're already using the Spam Management tools in the system (Settings -> Spam Management) then you should moderate the first and/or second post of registered users. If their posts are approved, you can promote them to a new user group that has more posting privileges.

However, if you keep up with the forum and delete spam regularly then the posts won't affect your search engine ranking.

[webgeek247]

Thing is they don't post any links. Just information from other sites.

In Human Verification Options

I have it set as reCAPTCHA™ 2.0

I also have Akismet and Stop Forum Spam enabled.

Got a good idea why it's happening. I'll just be reporting the IPs to spam databases. And will check with ISP if continues and really needed. Dam annoying.

We'll have to moderate the first post as you say.

Thanks,
Chris

[In Omnibus]

Is it being posted in quote tags?

[webgeek247]

No quotes no

[Wayne Luke]

Got a good idea why it's happening.

It is an attempt to get around context driven spam filters like Akismet. They wrap their links in text that isn't necessarily related. We have it on this site all the time. Just have to remain vigilant. Report and remove.