I have seen several threads come by the last few days where people sell information about where to find high PR forum threads. All with the purpose of adding a link to your signature, leave a post in the high PR forum thread and getting the PR juice from this. 1. Isn't this clear robbery? Charging people for other people's valuables? 2. This will affect the forum owner's own PR since multiple leeches are sucking PR. 3. Being in the same business, wouldn't it be fairer to trade link information that isn't your own? I have offered a linkback from my own sites for this information, not offering money for it but keeping the PR in the system. A thing is to be said about the webmaster that owns the forum, he or she is probably not aware of this issue but will suffer the PR leakage. What are your thoughts on this?
I do see it as morally wrong if they're going to post just for the sake of the backlinks. But if they actually participated with a relevant post(s) then it would be acceptable in my books.
i dont see the issue really all link building can be seen as stealing in that case as i dont want a recip link i only really want one way links. so i am always going to be getting the juice 1 way and unless i really have to i am not going to link back to anyone. the morality of all of this never really comes into it for me. its all just part of the game/job
I personally don't like it either. Granted, we are all here to make money online, and if they feel they have a valuable secret then people will always take advantage of that. I think ethics wise, it is fine to offer a trade for the information as you suggested though. I suppose as long as there are people willing to buy that information, then it will continue to sell. Although I think buyers could invest their money on other things though.
So what if you were the forum owner and had no idea what was going on? Someone was making money off your back and draining your site's PR in the process?
They are selling the time and effort they have taken to find/ collate the list of high PR pages etc I think it is as much the morals/ ethics of the person who spam the forum afterwards that is questionable as the person selling the list - after all people could be selling them simply as a "try to work out how forums can get high PR" lists rather than a spam list.