Viewing Thread:
"Increase in SEO Spammers using Gmail accounts - and how to improve things"

It always amuses me that so called SEO 'experts/companies' resort to Spamming people to try to generate work!

Here is a recent example from a 'contact form':

"Cecelia Maloney
[email protected]
0120120120
We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail."

A quick Google shows these are well known spammers so I have no problem listing their 'details'.

There is a chance they are not really interested in SEO but just trying to elicit a response to see if the email address is active - either way I recommend you NEVER reply.

A number of 'form' spammers just like to try and submit dodgy links - malicious and/or spam.

It seems Gmail is getting very popular with these spammers - and in my experience they are nearly all coming from Indian ISPs.

Once these spammers have the URL of your contact 'form' or 'guest book' they regularly return directly to the page to offer their services!

Recently I've started to maintain an .htaccess file so that I can manually deny access to these visitors - this stops them from even viewing my website.

This is what they get presented with if they try to return to my site:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.


My .htaccess file denying these spammers access currently looks like this:

order allow,deny
deny from 122.173.
deny from 122.167.
deny from 122.163.
deny from 122.183.
deny from 122.161.
deny from 122.177.
deny from 122.160.
deny from 122.172.
deny from 122.169.
deny from 121.247.167
deny from 94.100.25.52
deny from 117.200.162
deny from 182.68.
deny from 182.68.94
deny from 182.64.239
allow from all

This works well for me - I guess they move on to easier pickings and I only have to add a new IP address every few months.

Obviously if you need your website to be visible to certain countries (India in my IP examples) then you would need to be very careful using this method as it would be very easy to block legitimate visitors. Especially where I am using IP masks rather than full addresses.

If you are using Freeola's standard formmail script you simply have to add this line to your form code which will add your visitors IP address to any submitted messages:
<input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="yes">
A quick Google on the address will then show you if it is a problem IP.

Just thought I would pass this on in case others are troubled by similar spam, or if you have your own tips please let me know :¬)

[s]Hmmm...[/s]

Getting lots of people to your website is the easy part, it's getting them to come back that's tricky.

I'd write some articles but as a whitespace programmer it wouldn't work on these forums. I can't even write in Japanese. :(

McLong wrote:

Perhaps DL might want to give an article a try? ;)

Steady on McL :¬D Had been thinking of just that ... maybe a review or some of my 'ancient' software hints and tips that seem to still bring dividends :¬)

Thanks for the update McLong - that all makes sense.

I appreciate it's not straight forward launching something new like this.

*another idea*
You may already be thinking about it but also including FKB (Freeola Knowledge Base!) submissions in user profiles would be useful.

@Machie
I look forward to reading your "How I reached over 3 million page views a month" item :¬)




[s]Hmmm...[/s]

Dragonlance wrote:
Have to agree with Hmmm ... he deserves the recognition and so does anyone else providing 'help' for the KB, for that matter :¬)

When viewing a particular article (such as Hmmm...'s article) you can see the Author at the top of the page.

As well as the changes mentioned in my reply to Hmmm... below, at some stage we hope to have a Knowledge Base 'homepage' of sorts which will list out the Top Contributors, Most Popular Articles, Recent Comments and so on which should put the authors in the limelight a little bit more. This is a little way down the line at the moment though.

Hmmm... wrote:
...I wonder if it would be worth using an icon or colour to identify user submitted articles in the Knowledge Base from Freeola ones to help people?

We're looking to make a few changes to the layout of Category pages (such as the Web Space category) once we have a few more user-written articles.

This should make it much easier to define Freeola-related help articles, and general Knowledge Base articles and also help to distinguish between staff written articles and user written articles. For now though, I'm afraid you'll have to make do with being shown as the author when viewing your guide!

As I said recently, we've got lots of improvements planned for the Knowledge Base once it starts to pick up a bit of interest/activity. So as the weeks and months go by you should notice some nice new changes. As always though, your suggestions are very welcome.

Congratulations on the win Hmm... :)

Perhaps DL might want to give an article a try? ;) Maybe Machie could give our visitors some tips on boosting their website visitors? Remember, almost anything goes with the KB, so it should be really easy to pick a topic to write about.

Thanks for the Prize Freeola :¬)










& Thanks for the comments DL!
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

Have to agree with Hmmm ... he deserves the recognition and so does anyone else providing 'help' for the KB, for that matter :¬)

Thanks, I see I made it.

I wonder if it would be worth using an icon or colour to identify user submitted articles in the Knowledge Base from Freeola ones to help people?


[s]Hmmm...[/s]

I know, I have just not got around to proofing and re-reading it yet, expect it live later today.

Hmmm... wrote:
Butch wrote:
[i]...and should appear on-line, pending moderator approval, within a few hours!

Fantastic idea :¬)
I've given it a go![/i]


I see my submission from last week still shows as "Awaiting moderation" - did I get something wrong???

[s]Hmmm...[/s]