does google allow forum spam?

Lately many forums I use to visit (mostly phpbb based) have seen the arrival of spam bots that post useless messages filled with links to their sites to increase their PR. I understand blogs have this problem too.

This backlink spam is also done in more subtle ways. I know some webmasters that have posted in tens or hundreds of forums (one or two messages in each one) just to have a link to their sites from the server hosting that forum. They post legitimate stuff, usually a quick question that does fit in the forum, so it ain't considered spam. However using a simple google search you can see their habit of compulsively posting in massive amounts of forums without getting involved and becoming regular users of any of them.

What is google's policy about this?

 

Nobody knows what google's policy is except certain people who work for google.

But I know that the link: operator never returns signature links for my sites in google, and I've heard people theorise about how little these kind of links are worth. If I was developing a search engine, I certainly wouldn't put much value on signature links.

 

It's unfortunate that many forum and blog owners do not monitor their websites.

 

in the last month, my forums has gotten hit by Russian spammers, posting BS messages in my forum, with at least 20 pharma links in the posting and sig. Very annoying to delete and ban users. That being said, I can't imagine that the links would be worth very much SEO wise.

 

Well, I don't think one link is worth much, but having links in tens or hundreds of forums probably does help with pagerank. Unless Google is actively fighting this problem and not giving any importance to those links, that is.

 

Use a nofollow in your links to make sure these spam links don't count.

 

I'm fairly sure that forum and guestbook links are devalued in the eyes of Google. I'm not basing this on any evidence having never spammed either but it would be easy for Google to do and would make complete sense.

 

Carowan , You should permanently ban their ip (unless they're using unstatic ip)

 

Is there someone you can report spammers to?

 

It's like a public good, it benefits everyone but no one's motivated to do it (i.e. take on spammers directly). I remember personally tying up some "toner" spam operations 800 number for a few minutes at a time 10 years ago trying to talk to a manager (they just kept asking for my contact information) but I got tired of it.

Some of the huge tech companies did win some lawsuits against notorious US-based spam machine companies in the past couple years that I remember. Otherwise it just drives spam more underground and the like.

Eric