Spam on forums is a big problem for forum administrators and moderators and vBulletin is no more exempt from this than any other forum software. vBulletin spam takes many forms such as the obvious posting of advertisements in the forum. There is also the more subtle form of spam that involves bots signing up to just post links in profiles. Internet marketers see abuse of other people web properties to get backlinks for their own sites as a legitimate form of links building. Forums owners see these link builders as parasites. The problem with this vBulletin spam is that the search engines hold site owners responsible for the websites that they link to. If they link to bad neighbourhoods, then the site can be penalised. These profile link builders may be bad neighbourhoods. For all the different forums of vBulletin spam, a lot of different strategies need to be put into place by forum administrators. Many of these strategies are automated but others need manual intervention by staff. One preventative stragey is to make sure any links that are place on your forum by others are nonfollow’d. This means that you accept no responsibility for the quality of the site being linked to and the link provides no ranking benefit to the site that the link points at.

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