Will spam links in my forum hurt my rankings?

I have a forum attached to one of my sites, and I hadn't tended to it in a while, and now its filled with porn, real estate, and viagra spam (maybe for a few months)

No we all know inbound links don't hurt since you have no control over them.... but what about your outbound links? Are the SE's smart enough to know their indexing a forum and take that into account?

Haven't noticed any drop in my site so far. What do you guys think I should be expecting?

thanks

 

First of all, your trust score will take a hit for excessive link to low qulity site

Also, your other legit outbound link will carry less weight

 

I never thought of it that way, which is, on some level, kind of funny. A site for some random RPG getting SERPed for a dating site due to spam. Is there a word/term for such a paradox? If not, maybe it should be called Sausage, as it's crammed with things that should not be there *smirk*
Q

 

thanks for your responses guys.
I'd really like to hear from other forum owners too.
There have to be plenty of people who have a forum they've forgotten about, and by now is filled with spam. How were your rankings affected?
and I would still like to know:

for now....

 

if you use vBulletin you can buy/install vBSEO and it will add "no follow" links to every link on your board.

 

Another reason why spammers spam sites/blogs besides to gain links is to get a certain page of your site to rank high for their desired keyword, which bring their desired traffic to your page they have spammed with their links to gain a clickthrough.

This way they don't need to worry about their own sites ranking in search engines.

 

I have vbSEO and it doesn't do that. Is that a setting you have to enable or what?

 

Vbseo really does that? That changes my opinion of it a little.

 

yes, in the admincp

go to my board and look at the page source.

 

I agree that the nofollow is pointless against forum spammers. They seemingly show up regardless and it's not about spam as much as it is about product recognition & clickthrough (as Windtalker mentioned).

Honestly, the best offense against spammers is a good defense. Captcha is still good, assuming you have the advanced options set (slant, and backgrounds) there are other options as well like the 'questions' hacks (What color is orange?) and other things. Though in the end, a good mod team is tops, as some of the spammers are actually human who can actually read.
Q

 

This feature is designed to prevent PageRank from being leaked to external sites.

You should definitely delete all posts containing spam links discovered on your forum.

 

They will hurt you in time for sure!

A forum is an extension of your website, its no different, you wouldn't link to spam and porn sites off your homepage or other content pages would you? why would you think that linking to them from the forum is ok and would be any different?



You need to remove them..

 

yeah, after running my board for 6+ years now I certainly realize this and have around 10 moderators that help.

there is a hack for vB that adds another layer to CAPTCHA, it displays for random images and asks the user to click the image that is a "blank', it works great. spam was cut down to about 10% after adding this hack on my board.

 

correct, if you read the second sentence of the original question I was recommending your product based on that question. a bit out of context for what he was asking in regards to the spam/porn.

No we all know inbound links don't hurt since you have no control over them.... but what about your outbound links? Are the SE's smart enough to know their indexing a forum and take that into account?

if you like I can stop plugging your product, won't hurt me any.