I've been noticing a large number of people registering in my forums lately. They register and create a user account, but never post anything. This always seemed strange to me, normally I do not register at a site until I am ready to post something, otherwise why register.

However, I did notice almost all of these accounts had listed a website, which PHPBB does. And it was almost always an online poker site, timeshare, refi, or whatever the latest spam flavor of the month is. I guess they are registering just to get their homepage link on the PHPBB membership list page, thats the only thing I can figure.

Is this a common traffic building technique? I guess its not totally spamming since they don't post anything, just register. But it still seems annoying.

Registering in forums it wont increase the traffic If you registered in forums then If you have any questions or if you are able to give the answers to threads then you will become a frequent user then the administrator will give the permission to keep the signature . Then if you keep the your site in the signature then automatically Traffic will increase.

Forums is good to generate traffic to your websites.

Spreading the word is the best way to go. Advertise anywhere and everywhere in order to draw traffic. Eventually, it will pick up with time.

Start some fourms topics in your niche market and post tutorials , free source code , code tips, jobs ads etc...

Work on creating questions topics that you think will make people want to talk about it..

This happens on some forums, you get people that enjoy to read post and will only post if they need to. So don't take it to bad, at least you getting traffic.

Setup some banners on your forum, and use that to build a email list. In that way you can get them to come back to the forums. You can do a lot with a email list.

maybe you registretion process is to much complicated

If the registration process was too complicated, he wouldn't have been seeing the increase as people would have given up before finishing the registration. Perhaps in 2006 when this post was originally written, there was some backlink benefit to having your website listed on the forums membership page or something? I don't think it works that way now or at least I haven't heard of it being an effective method in obtaining links.

Members should post their messages and views to the threads to be active...

I have recently joined this forum but now I am feeling to be active...

All the best...

Going back to the original post, it actually is a form or spamming - it's called profile spam. These users register and then create forum signatures, which appear in their member profiles regardless of whether they post or not. The goal is to get a backlink to their site from their member profile with minimal effort.

A tactic to prevent this is to make member profiles only show up for guests.

Does that type of link count for SEO, etc? Do the search engines actually crawl the profile pages of all the forums? I can't think that it would be all that helpful because this is one tactic I haven't seen promoted by the IM "gurus" (you know, the ones who THINK they are gurus...lol).