Member Avatar for jay 11

Here's a recent rant from search journalist, Danny Sullivan, regarding link spam. This is a good read for anyone involved with SEO.

"...the core problem is that the web has people who think nothing of vandalizing other web sites. That’s what link spamming is. You’re not adding value to a site. You’re simply spray painting garbage on someone else’s property, for your own personal benefit. You have no manners. You have no morals. You ought to be ashamed." - .

Community sites, such as discussion forums, social networking platforms, and blogs can use automated filters and human moderators to help combat spam but this does not fully deter spammers. Additionally, there are no federal or state laws (that i know of) against bombing someone else's website with irrelevant comments and threads in order to obtain a link for your own personal gain.

Other than moderating and software filtering, I wonder what other methods site owners use to combat link spam?

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As ’s pointer to Danny Sullivan makes plain, link spam is vandalism of other people’s sites. and call it an industry problem; ’s example shows how opening comments to links is an invitation for automated junk. Tackling this effectively means layers of deterrence, not a single fix.

  • Policy + UX: require a low-friction registration barrier (email verification or OAuth), limit signature links, and keep new accounts on a moderation queue until trust is earned. This reduces the incentive to spray generic links.
  • Form hardening: use a hidden "honeypot" field, JS-only tokens, and simple rate limits so unsophisticated bots fail silently while real users do not notice friction.
  • Content rules: automatically strip or convert anchor tags from untrusted posts, allow at most one URL per new-account post, and mark all user-submitted links rel="nofollow" until the author reaches a trust threshold.
  • Server defenses: throttle POSTs per IP, employ fail2ban-style rules for repeated form abuse, and use a lightweight WAF to catch common payloads. Avoid blunt IP blocks on shared hosting ranges.
  • Signals and automation: flag posts with high link-to-word ratios, repeated anchor text, or identical text submitted across many threads; route flagged items to a human queue.
  • Community + escalation: enable easy flagging, train moderators on false-positive patterns, and, for persistent abuse, report to host/registrar or escalate through abuse channels.

Practical snippets (simple concepts; adapt for the platform):

HTML honeypot + server check

<input type="text" name="hp_field" value="" style="position:absolute;left:-9999px;" autocomplete="off">
if (!empty($_POST['hp_field'])) { http_response_code(403); exit; }

Count URLs in a comment and hold if too many

$urls = preg_match_all('/https?:\/\/[^\s"]+/i', $comment);
if ($urls > 1) { /* hold for moderation */ }

Caveats: test rules on a staging site, keep logs to tune thresholds, and avoid overblocking legitimate contributors. Relying solely on search engines (as hoped) is passive; a blend of UX design, lightweight automation, and human moderation keeps communities useful while choking off the ROI of link spammers.

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Member Avatar for stephen186

Link Spamming is really a serious problems for webmasters and today everyone is spamming forums, bookmarking sites to hell...

Member Avatar for canadafred

The only thing to do is to keep talking about it, and make link building schemes as a serious SEO deterent. Link builders have glorified their trade and even consider themselves search engine optimizers, even though many of them can't write English.

Web pages should never be rewarded for artificially gaining credible, relevant links, never. The search engine need to continue filtering this type of activity. They've done well by demeriting the dumpster directories and have come a long way with the link swappers but need to focus more attention on the useless blog commenting in order to drop links, nonsensial forum articles full of links, paid links, unworthy news articles in press releases, Linkedin spam (multiple profles linked together to appear important) etc.

I post my comment on Matt Cutts blog, the spam report pages, my blog, this forum, webmasterworld ... I get a lot of flack from the link schemers but somebody gotta' speak out.

Unfortunately, Google has made its riches off the back of the lolely link and it's going to take a long time to shake it off, unless the governments step in to clean it up. The Internet has become one big link dump.

Member Avatar for Ezzaral

Personally I'm surprised there aren't more sig link spamming "thanks for this informations!" posts in this thread yet.

Member Avatar for max4999

yep! i agree with you, there should be an ethical way of putting in links, but i had to shutdown my blog (i had one blogger blog) and i removed a ll the no follow tags from it. in 7 days time my blog was full of 236 comments! i had to make it a no follow again, bu still they didnt stop coming. eventually i had to turn it off

Member Avatar for jay 11

yep! i agree with you, there should be an ethical way of putting in links, but i had to shutdown my blog (i had one blogger blog) and i removed a ll the no follow tags from it. in 7 days time my blog was full of 236 comments! i had to make it a no follow again, bu still they didnt stop coming. eventually i had to turn it off

That's a shame. One (arguably counter-productive) way of combating spam is blocking the IP address(es). Anyone have any experience with this?

Member Avatar for thefandango

the irony is that there are sites out there that offer ways to build one way backlinks without spamming, believe me I know as I spent 9 months developing one, but no matter how much you put it in peoples faces, they still get fixated with spamming blogs and directories.

People are mostly sheep unfortunately.

Edited by thefandango because: n/a
Member Avatar for host1plus

I think soon Google will take care of it in its own way. I think i feel how one big boom are coming for all link buyers,forum spamerrs and etc things - Nice dream yes?

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