CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[greg_mitch]

Register to remove this ad. It's free!

To Club Members only? or to people with over 50 posts?

I think people come here to sign up and put a few posts with signature links just to drive up their websites traffic.

Some sort of SEO trick I guess. It is annoying.

PS - I do realize the irony of me complaining as I have a few links in my signature and one of them is not related to HT...

[kal]

Signature links are indeed one reason why spammers will sign up and then post nonesense just to have their URLs listed. It's all about SEO (search engine optimization) as you mentioned. It's not so much that people will actually click on their links, but if they can use automated tools to sign up to forums in a few hours or days, they can quite litterally have tens of thousands of links to their site "live" on the internet that search engines then crawl which brings their ranking up.

I'm not sure I'd want to limit it to users with lots of posts however as I don't have any issues with members advertising their sites here, as you do. Go for it. When a spammer does post it's pretty obvious and we nuke them typically within hours. Not showing their signatures would lessen their SEO task but wouldn't stop them from signing up posting unfortunately.

Kal

[kal]

Signature links are indeed one reason why spammers will sign up and then post nonesense just to have their URLs listed. It's all about SEO (search engine optimization) as you mentioned. It's not so much that people will actually click on their links, but if they can use automated tools to sign up to forums in a few hours or days, they can quite litterally have tens of thousands of links to their site "live" on the internet that search engines then crawl which brings their ranking up.

I'm not sure I'd want to limit it to users with lots of posts however as I don't have any issues with members advertising their sites here, as you do. Go for it. When a spammer does post it's pretty obvious and we nuke them typically within hours. Not showing their signatures would lessen their SEO task but wouldn't stop them from signing up posting unfortunately.

Kal

[greg_mitch]

[kal]

Lots of different ways to make money... some sell actual products or services, some make money off advertising (Google Adsense or otherwise). By doing this spamming they're simply increasing their exposure which in turn gets more traffic to their site(s).

Is it worth it? No idea. It's done because the cost is basically nothing. People can post in thousands of forums or spam millions via email for next to no cost at all. If it doesn't work they're not really out much $$$ at all other than the cheap software to do it. Compare that to printing flyers and handing them out door to door or sticking them on car windshields in parking lots. That's labour intensive and costs money (paper, printing). Or worse yet, taking out magazine ads, newspaper ads, radio commericals, TV commercials, etc. Very expensive!

The good thing about expensive advertising is that because it's expensive (relatively speaking) as compared to spamming, the quality is better. That's why SPAM is typically so crappy and poorly written. The cost of entry is so low that anyone and everyone can do it for next to free.

Kal

[kal]

Lots of different ways to make money... some sell actual products or services, some make money off advertising (Google Adsense or otherwise). By doing this spamming they're simply increasing their exposure which in turn gets more traffic to their site(s).

Is it worth it? No idea. It's done because the cost is basically nothing. People can post in thousands of forums or spam millions via email for next to no cost at all. If it doesn't work they're not really out much $$$ at all other than the cheap software to do it. Compare that to printing flyers and handing them out door to door or sticking them on car windshields in parking lots. That's labour intensive and costs money (paper, printing). Or worse yet, taking out magazine ads, newspaper ads, radio commericals, TV commercials, etc. Very expensive!

The good thing about expensive advertising is that because it's expensive (relatively speaking) as compared to spamming, the quality is better. That's why SPAM is typically so crappy and poorly written. The cost of entry is so low that anyone and everyone can do it for next to free.

Kal