How are they creating these spam links on my XF forum?

[cbpayne]

I was just perusing the backlinks to my site and came across 1000's of spam links pointing to URL's on my forum. There were a lot of them.

This is one example of a page on my forum that some of the links were pointing to:

http://podiatryarena.com/proxy.php?....com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-lottery/

Obviously something nefarious going on. I have not seen this before.

How can I stop this and get rid of all these links on my site? How are they creating them?

AHREF's backlink tool reports finding 79 of these spam backlinks to these types of URL's on my forum in the last 24hrs; most of the links to me are fake blog comments - so whatever is going on they are ramping it up

I am not worried about the spam links pointing to my site, its just the links like that eg above that they are creating on my site.

 

[Tracy]

I think what you are referring to is referred to as "spammy backlinks".

Google: What to do About Spammy Links from "Malicious Domains"

Google's John Mueller answers a question about how to handle unwanted spammy backlinks

www.searchenginejournal.com

 

[cbpayne]

Yes, they are spammy backlinks, but those spam backlinks are linking to links that the spammers have created on my forum. I am trying to find out how they were able to create those links in xenforo - see the sample I posted above. They somehow have created lots of those types of external links on my forum.

Oh, and if these black hat nut jobs are doing it to me, then they must be doing it to a lot of XF forums.

 

[Tracy]

Well, if you allow posting of links to normal users, you are probably getting human sign-ups from certain Asian countries that have setups for doing just this. They aren't robotic, but are human and can beat most automated spam checks until they get listed (either via IP, email or username) in the spam lists.
What XF features are you using currently as anti-spam techniques? Have you found the users involved and ran spam cleaner on them in the XF moderations?
Are you allowing your normal users to bypass no-follow links (a user group permission setting)? With the nofollow attribute, search engines should not be picking those links up.

 

[cbpayne]

Thats the thing, I can't link those links to any particular user, so its not clear to me where the links are being created from.

Oddly, the outgoing link from the site is rel="nowfollow" !!!!!!, when it should be rel="nofollow" .... another problem I need to solve.

 

[Tracy]

If those are showing up in your link proxy log in the ACP, then simply click on one of them... it will show you where it is coming from.

Where exactly are those links being shown that you refer to...

 

[cbpayne]

Thanks. The link proxy log is empty.

I only can find the links (like the eg I posted above) by following the spam backlinks I found pointing at my site. They are clearly part of a blackhat link building campaign for the site that they are linking to. Somehow they are placing the link on my site to their site, then building a zillion spam links to the link that is on my site to boost it.

 

[cbpayne]

I don't think its profile link spam, as when you click on a link in a user's profile, it goes straight to the website and not via an external link warning like the eg above.