My website, which contains a phpBB message board, is doing quite alright and I have no complaints about my ranking. From the beginning my forum's been targeted by spammers. I manage to block bots effectively so far. Now as of this month, I notice the following keywords rank high in the top 10 list of how 'people' find my site: - forum - profile - password ...all of which are not at all relevant search terms for my site. Surely this is caused by bots trying to find suitable targets for their spam attacks. Is there a way to instruct search engines, in particular Google, to leave my site out of any search results for these specific keywords without blocking other, relevant keywords? Thanks for any advice.
I don't think you can block specific keywords. Instead ensure that none of your login or forget passwords pages are indexed. Make any links to those pages nofollow. Also block such pages with your robots.txt. You could also limit the use of those words on your pages. You could switch those links to graphical links.
Thanks for the advice. I believe I've blocked indexing of the profile pages now but closer inspection of site statistics shows other popular new search terms include "topic", "posts" and "joined". If what you say is correct then the only way I could prevent these searches from finding my site is by blocking indexing of my entire forum, which would be extremely counterproductive. It's not an option.
Unfortunately that's a downfall of using widely used website software such as forum software. Once spammers find a weakness, they can easily find most other sites that are using that same software. The only way I could think of to hide all those words is to make them all images. This might not be something that you can simply hide from. Instead you might have to deal with it in other ways. You could persistently ban all spammers, but they would likely just mask their ips or use proxies. You could force all users to verify their e-mail address, but you likely already do that. The annoying captcha verification boxes might limit some spam too. You may need to recruit more admins/moderators to actively delete any spam right away. There is also the option of automatically making all external links nofollow. Really this forum probably isn't a very good place to ask this question. There are likely far more spammers than forum owners here. Try posting this question on a forum dedicated to running forums instead. Good luck fighting those evil spammers.