There’s outright spam and then there’s stuff that’s questionable. Under questionable I’d put posts that ask for help with a website and or new business venture. Concept discussion is one thing but posting links takes it over the edge for me. Even if the concept is something that might be relevant here, I don’t think it’s appropriate to help someone promote their money-making venture in this forum. Some may be fine with it but I think it’s a ‘slippery slope’ kind of thing. Just my 2¢.
I’m on a wine forum that requires anyone who wants to put a link in their signature to pay for a business membership. But the site is highly moderated so people trying to use the site for free mentoring are flushed out pretty quickly.
May I disagree with you about the content
The internet ecosystem is actually different from what the general viewer thinks it is. There’s totally white hat ways to promote a website, and then black hat ways to do it. Posting a link in a meaningful way to get a backlink is totally accpeted among the webmasters, and is actually encouraged. For example, a regular member posts a cooking video from their Youtube channel to get more views. It’s true they get some money from Google for that, but that’s not harmful at all, and that’s one legitimate way of promoting a Youtube channel.
But then there’s the harmful way too. If someone just pops in, creates an account, dumps a link and disappears, that’s spam. That’s usually tracked by bots and deleted but mostly go untracked which should be deleted by a mod.
One good example of unethical promotion is what LinkdIn did a decade or so ago. Hence I’m still not on that site, nor do I encourage anyone to join it. They did one of the dirtiest tricks to promote their site, and somehow they got away with it and achieved their target.
The other thing is that forums is one popular and prescribed way to promote online enterprises. There are millions of people who make a living out of internet, and they support each other mutually. For example, (I’m not sure if HO is monetizing the forum) HO is popular among food content creators. And those food content creators use HO to get their content known. Through that, HO gets more visitors, and become more popular.
So it’s a mutually beneficial thing to do it without spamming, and legitimately, and without doing any harm to the forum.
If you look at those who charge money for adding a link, you’ll find that their beginning has been as humble as anyone else’s, but they started making more money after becoming popular. Browse that site’s history on the Wayback Machine, and you’ll see.
Of course it’s alright. Personally I don’t appreciate the feeling of being ‘used’ to help someone else make money unless I know I’m agreeing to do that in advance. Sometimes it just seems out of line.
spammers are not “uniform” and “homogeneous” in their techniques or purposes.
the most “innocent” are those who discovered the internet last week and are all agog that they can ‘be published world wide.’
example: joined site today, one post, text starts “A I previously mentioned…”
no previous posts - copy/paste - no genuine attempt - the evil eye is upon him…
then the fake bloggers - who typically have a ‘list of the ten best’ or ‘we tried x models’ - which all 1000% fake - they simply copy the advertising/marketing nonsense and oh-by-the-way click here to buy, , , and we get a commission… a variation on the theme is the linked video.
those kinds of spam sites are nothing more than income generating concepts. any spammed/linked site that is selling ‘something’ anywhere on the site should not be trusted for information or prices.
I’m particularly fond of spammers like that have ‘extensively tested’ appliances that are only available in 110 volt, posting from countries that use 220 volt…
then there’s the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) agents - who, for a fee, promise your site will come up on page 1 of a google search… frequently ‘answer’ a very old post, simply because of the subject line…
many other variations.
if users can edit their posts at much later times - a spam post with an “innocent” link which they replace on edit, or a nonsense post with no links - links added later, etc etc etc.
ye olde fishing question from new comer, magically answered by (the same) newcomer with a link to a maidens’ prayer…
the SEO theory is to plaster the url as widely as possible thinking that Google will make it a star.
Google changed their algorithms, so none of that works anymore, but the SEO types still collect a lot of money from naive bloggers.
100% true
I personally know a few blogs that review Kroger and Sam’s Club but the funny thing is the reviews are written by Pakistanis and Nigerians.
The thing about those “top 10” sites etc., is that they never aim long term. Buy a domain name, set up a site, get some articles written for 5USD from fiverr, and then get the “services” of another “SEO specialist” from fiverr to pull some ten thousand back links from a backlink farm. The site goes up, make a profit, and be killed by Google within weeks.
From Nigerian princes, to friends who got stranded somewhere near a Western Union branch, spamming and scamming have evolved a long way. Increasingly it’s becoming hard to differentiate which is which.
No one single tool or setting is going to thwart the spammers. We have that setting, and community moderation tools, and then the mods. ultimately, with all the safeguard, they just have to work really hard to spam. and they will have to decide whether its worth their time to do all of that in order to post a link, before we decide collectively we definitely don’t want those links there.
Browse that site’s history on the Wayback Machine, and you’ll see.
