It just makes me wonder of the effectiveness of this kind of advertising. I mean, how much does site traffic increase when an online business spams random forums like this? I just ignore all the advertisements anyway because they aren't going to answer any question I have.
The purpose is less advertising than SEO. Google traditionally treats links to a site as testaments to their worth - by linking to a page, X, the author is saying "I find this site valuable". So spam links on forum posts are trying to tell Google that the Qhimm domain finds the target site a useful resource.
A simple response is to just add a rel="nofollow" to all user and post links. This tells Google to disregard the hyperlinks entirely. If a webmaster does not do this, two things happen:
- Qhimm links lose their weight to Google. This has the benefit of razing any short-term advantages gained by the spammers, but the disadvantage of reducing the weight of genuine outbound links;
- The Qhimm domain gets seen as 'untrustworthy', and could potentially lose weight in Google search. That's not great.
I'd have to speak to fellow staff but I'm fairly confident that our board software provides a rel="nofollow" plugin. If it gets really bad we could always search for something that prevents new users from posting hyperlinks entirely.
