Just discovered a new(?)fraudulent way to increase the Google PR
 

I have noticed a lot of new "members" at my webmaster-related board (http://www.fhgstore.com/board/). Lots of people just register there entering a wrong email, so they know for sure they would not be approved to post. I was a little bit curious why they are doing this... When I checked over some suspicious dead (i.e. not-approved) accounts, I've notices they always entered some URL in the "Your Website" field on registration form. But when I checked the list of members there (http://www.fhgstore.com/board/memberlist.php), I understood the situation... The members.php file is spidered by SE and it has some PR. For instance, my one has PR=2, but I'm sure some more famous boards have much bigger PR on their "members" list. So... all these URLs' (99,9% of them are non-adult at all) are getting spidered and earning some PR from my site. Shit, I had no guess about such a trick earlier. Course I have removed all the URLs' on such fraudulent accounts or replaced them with my own ones. Ok, let's these bastards get that they deserved for.

To summarize all the above, I would recommend all board masters to re-check their members lists for non-approved accounts with false email addresses but working URLs' (as I said above, most of them will be not related to the adult business at all!)

Hope my post will be usefull at least for someone here...

cleverrr

you shouldn't post this stuff in public :error

I have noticed alot of activity like this aswell. Almost all of the accounts are using a url similar to http://somethinghere.boom.ru/

Most of the sites are not adult related, however some of the links are promoting pregnant incest shit. I have removed the link to the memberslist from my index. Though it wont stop whatever they are using to register the fake accounts, it will at least keep the SE's from spidering that page.

i wonder how many people are going to do this after you posted it lol

Thanks Vadim - you're a true gent!

thank you for the tip, lol

lol.. this is old news for me. I've made it at winamp's forum 1 year ago, few months ago they removed my usernam tho. it was good to have a free pr5 backlink :D

he just spammed his webmaster board :Graucho


j/k

Why not? Let's the ppl (I mean board masters) will be aware of it! Notified means PROTECTED.

Exactly!!! I had found a lot of these URL's at boom.ru as well. Seems my post was useful at least for you man :thumbsup

lmao, soooo 2 years ago

Hey Doug! Nice to hear from you :thumbsup

2all: I understand how many cheaters will try to use this method. But don't forget they're ALREADY USING IT. So I think it will be right to inform all the board masters here. Hope they re-check their memer lists and will carefully check each new member.

Is there anything to be proud of, dude? :disgust You just called yourself a cheater in the public forum. Congrats...

Nice assssssss you have dude :winkwink:

Don't you think I could find some better way to spam it? At least through one time announcement.

so as long as we sign up with legit e-mails you will be fine with it :winkwink: j/k

That's what rel=nofollow is designed to put a stop to. Just modify your board to insert that in the href, and even if people don't stop spamming you, at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing it doesn't do them any good.

Cheers
-b

damn that's clever. thanks for the tip!

I have a better way. I will just change all theirs URL's to my own ones. Let's see who will prevail :winkwink:

Why pussyfoot around gaining PR - just go for the adwords jugular:

This has been a public service anouncement, paid for by the Green party.

Hot news 03 feb, 2005
----
Security researchers have discovered a way to shut down or seriously impair a Google Adwords advertising campaign by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed. By running searches against particular keywords from compromised hosts, attackers can cause click-through percentage rates to fall through the floor.

This, in turn, causes Google Adwords to automatically disable the affected campaign keywords and prevent ads from being displayed. By disabling campaign keywords using the technique, cybercrimals could give their preferred parties higher ad positions at reduced costs, according to click fraud prevention specialists Clickrisk.


"By disabling targeted keywords across many advertisers' campaigns simultaneously by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed an attacker can secure a higher ad position," explains Clickrisk.com chief exec Adam Sculthorpe. The attack - dubbed keyword hijacking - is difficult to prevent because it takes advantage of a design feature of Google Adwords rather than a flaw, he added. Clickrisk came across the attack in investigating why the click through rates of one of its clients - which had been running at a steady rate - dropped to zero for no apparent reason. Subsequent monitoring and forensic testing revealed that a botnet made up of open proxies in China was responsible for the attack.

High?cost-per-click (CPC) advertisers in niche markets are particular vulnerable to the keyword hijacking attack. "Once keywords are disabled they can't be re-enabled and attacks can go undetected for some time," Sculthorpe told El Reg. When keywords are disabled an advertiser must erase all campaigns featuring the affected keywords and create a new campaign as a workaround.

Although the true scope of the problem remains unclear, Clickrisk security analysts believe the keyword hijacking attack may be widely exploited. Clickrisk advises users to monitor click-through rates and traffic levels, log into Google Adwords campaign frequently and check that keywords are not disabled.

The incidence of click fraud risk exposure in general is on the rise. According to Clickrisk?s chief risk officer, Jack Bensimon, "our clients have experienced substantial losses ranging from 20 ? 65 per cent of their total click costs." Bensimon believes that "managing business risk is a critical component of online advertising" and further recommends that "online marketers should be vigilant and regularly monitor keywords".

There is another way for that. I know PHP very well, so I can modify it so the URL's will be listed only if a person made at least 10 or may be 50 posts ;)

I'm gonna make such a mod for PHPbb and put it for FREE on this board.

So what's your next turn man? :1orglaugh

i knew this shit back in 85' yo


fuckin nooberts

this thread need some lindsay boobies

You use phpbb?

read this:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=234090

These hacks might be useful:
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/2959 - Deter Spam Websites
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/560 - Anti Robotic Registration Flood
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/1528 - Hide Unactive Members
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/2961 - Block Open Proxy Registrants
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/2975 - Log Registration IP
http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/3182 - Block Bad Bots

http://www.phpbb.com/files/mods/disa...bots-1.0.1.mod

There's also a hack to make it so members cant get their homepage shown before they did certain amount of posts. I havent the link for it, but search for it. Its out there somewhere.

Further you can also remove the homepage option in the signup and user modify templates. You can still add homepage in control panel for trusted users, if you do it that way.
Also you can remove the "newest member" from your mainsite.

Im pretty sure you can get a hack soon for the "nofollow" tag too :thumbsup

AFAIK there was no Internet in 85 :error

lol post bots? :1orglaugh

That's tooooo easy to avoid. So you'll need something bit more smarter...

BTW this is also a tool for webmasters to increase serps on your own forums..

I know some guys that used to do that... google dropped all thier pages to PR 0

Yeah its very easy to get blackballed in Google and very difficult to get fix it :P

BTW, a honest webmaster may promote his resouces by means of other LEGAL ways (e.g. buy ad spots, signatures etc). For instance, I don't suppress any adult webmaster-related "SPAM" right in general section of my forum, because all these announcements could be really useful to other webmasters. Course I'm always removing all the ILLEGAL and NON-ADULT ads from there. However I don't want to suffer all these fraudulent attempts (like described above) to rise somebody's PR due to my resource!

Interesting.. scuse me, I need to run and check something..

This has been exploited by a few sites ... check the #1 ranking on Google for "phone sex" then check that site's backlinks, there are a bunch of links coming from User Profile pages on popular message boards.

I think you missed my point :)

I meant if your a forum owner you can use this to increase your own serp's

For example, you own a small 1000 user forum , you could add 2000 random users to increase your members list , while at the same time adding pages for se's to spider ( along with the website url )

I didnt mean that its usefull to do to other people's forums..

This is an old school trick... Many of the high PR boards block or list their member list by join date (in descending order) in the memberlist.php.

Got you. Actually I'm doing something similar now. I'm just changing the fraudulent URL's to my own ones. Why add more fake members? I can use the existing ones ;)

That's a good point, but I don't think there are enough memberlist.php spammers out there that would make a significant impact on your internal page count.

Nice Post man.Click Fraud is a real problem but methinks this post is a bit heavy for gfy.
It would get better reception on webmasterworld.com.

Yep, wrong move there buddy...you should had kept this for yourself... :disgust

so what I've done was not moral but what you want to do now is.. ha

I wouldn't even bother to signup to get a PR2 link to be honest...
there are better ways to increase PR :)

heh... Not everyone is so honest as you.

thanks, cyberxxx
will check our members ASAP =)

I hope people that are considering doing this that will not bring the results they want since the members profile data will be the only place with the spammed url...

Ok, as promised... Here is an express solution for PhpBB script (I think I could fix the other ones, but I'm using PhpBB only). So let's begin...

1) go to your main forum directory (say bla-bla-bla.com/board) and look for memberlist.php.

2) open it (memberlist.php) with a text editor when search for the following lines:

$www_img = ( $row['user_website'] ) ? '<a href="' . $row['user_website'] . '" target="_userwww"><img src="' . $images['icon_www'] . '" alt="' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '" title="' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '" border="0" /></a>' : '';
$www = ( $row['user_website'] ) ? '<a href="' . $row['user_website'] . '" target="_userwww">' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '</a>' : '';


now just replace them (I mean the lines above) with the following code:

if ($posts > 1) {
$www_img = ( $row['user_website'] ) ? '<a href="' . $row['user_website'] . '" target="_userwww"><img src="' . $images['icon_www'] . '" alt="' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '" title="' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '" border="0" /></a>' : '';
$www = ( $row['user_website'] ) ? '<a href="' . $row['user_website'] . '" target="_userwww">' . $lang['Visit_website'] . '</a>' : '';
} else {
$www_img = '&nbsp;';
$www = '&nbsp;';
}


3) now just upload the modified memberlist.php file into your main forum's directory

That's it guys! Now URL's will be shown for those members only, who have posted at least 1 (one!) message to your board. Course you may change the required number of posts as you want. Just put an appropriate value to this line:
if ($posts > 1) {

e.g.:
if ($posts > 10) { // means: make at least 10 posts to see your URL in the members list! ;)

Hope it will be useful for somebody :) At least it works great on my own board

:winkwink:

cool advice...you're a smart guy :)

Hmmm....very clever. Great tip. :))

Flip it around to benefit yourself. Clever.

lol!!!! is this thread for real ? ? ? yeah how fraudulent , try to get a link on a pr 2 site on a "sneaky" way , pls kill the bastards that try this

and yeah this will REALLY HELP your sites pr , lol!!!

come on now , get real , this thread is 100% total bullshit

bunch of idiots