For SEO specialists and my old Black Hat crew. An SEO high wind advisory.
I admire the creator of this link scam for their ingenuity. Xrumer is an autosubmitter program – it will sign you with up with major forum software platforms like phpbb and even post your first post for you. Not much new with this type of software, but their game plan is brilliant.
They are using their own software in a massive one way link blitz. This dwarfs the old Google bomb by a longshot.
Their first auto-submitted post does not contain a link, it simply says something along the lines of: “I am looking for Xrumer auto-submit software, does anyone know where I can find the official website?” – Because they did not drop a link like most spammers, it goes unnoticed as spam. Now enter the well meaning member (and I have seen many ADMINS fall for this) who googles Xrumer and posts the link for them.
They have just received a bonafied link from a trusted member of that community. Now that is quality spam!
You can google Xrumer yourself to see how many forums are hit with it – it is quite impressive. It has hit so many forums recently that I really do not think there is a way to undo it – They got massive linkage.
Do not be tempted to buy it, Google will figure it out eventually and penalize it. Maybe you could get away with it if you had a mark that was already branded for linkage – take your chances.
A couple things to consider if you are tempted in buying the Xrumer software:
1) The obvious – you are perpetuating Black Hat SEO and spam.
2) Xrumer is a very unique search term, the same ploy would not work on any competitive term – and if you already have branding for your term, you would not want to take a chance with this anyway.
3) If you drop a link on the first post with the program you will be tagged for spam. To drop a link on the first post is the intended use of the software. Xrumer got around this with a unique term and disposable domain for quick cash.
Just guessing, I would bet they rake in an easy $200,000 in one week, or better. Would be interesting to know the real figures.
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Forum admins are today being warned of a new wave of spam coming to forums.
It comes after Russian hackers developed a script to auto submit spam posts to a wide range of forum software – and released it onto the open markets.
The script is able to post to forums even when email validation is required – a common anti-spam tactic used by forum admins.
Targeted forum software claimed open to attack includes vbulletin, phpbb, Invision Power Board, PHP-Nuke, yaBB, IconBoard, UltimateBB, exBB, phorum.org, wiki, different types of bulletin boards and even custom-written code.
Forum admins are advised to follow basic anti-spam procedures, and ensure they have common Russian email addresses blocked, such as mail.ru, inbox.ru, cashette.com, and gawab.com.
For those tempted to use high volume forum spamming, it needs emphasising that forum spam rarely lasts more than a few minutes on valuable forums, and the returns are likely miminal.
However, damage to reputation and standing could be considerable, and may additionally subject the user to legal proceedings under the Computer Misuse Act.
Thankyou for hosting this information. I have very limited knowedge on forum admistration but I’ve pointed out your article to the Admin of a board I frequent. It’s annoying for the mods as the spam we get doesn’t even manage to get more than a dozen reads for each thread but nevertheless the mods are haveing to remove threads on a daily basis.
For phpbb there is a Post Reporting mod where any member can report a post as spam. You can also implement graphics at registration which will stop some bots. I have removed the website url field from my registration forms, so if someone tries to fill that field in at registration I know it is a bot and the IP is auto-banned. These together have helped remove over 90% of the spam from my forums. But some still gets through if members are not hip to what spam is.
i have seen to trailers on their website and made me bow, i have seen people talking about it on black hat seo and made me bow again i have seen the price and looked into my pockets and i went mad.
it is a great software but the price is outraging and they have a monthly fee also….i only hope that someone soon will realease a crack for it but why would someone waste time cracking it when they can use that time making money with it. sad!
I admit it’s tempting to use it. Just know that black hat SEO practices usually end in complete devastation for the website owner. If you are truly black hat and want to use disposable URL’s then I guess that’s a course already chosen. But short of that, I strongly recommend you stay white hat. I paid a heavy price for using heavy SEO tricks in the past and learned my lesson the hard way. Just trying to save you the same pain.
“You can also implement graphics at registration which will stop some bots.” This will stop only the people with bad eyes like me, not the bots.
Hi,
Thanks a Ton for this article.
I run a reasonably big forum with about 85000 members, One of the newly registered user posted:
======================
Hello all
Anybody here know about XRumer program?!
Give me some info or link to description…. thanks.
Also, do you know when XRumer 4.0 Platinum Edition will be released?
P.S. Sorry for my post in “http://www.abcdef.net/forumdisplay.php?f=15” folder…
======================
so, like a good admin, i searched the google trying to find an answer, but thankfully i found your article & banned the user, his email domain, ip & tightened the registration requirements. I am not sure if we are safe from these spammers after doing all this, but i guess we know that me may get spammed heavily shortly 😀
Thanks again for this great article, let me know if i could be of any help to you 🙂
Brett
Haha Brett, ive been on your site and know all about it :p You’ve probably seen me around
Was that Brett Takbe? If so then Holy Schmoley I’m honored. The good ‘ol days on WW when black hat was easy and Google was stupid……
Xrumer Link Scam … hyp ..arround a certain product ..thats sold in 9 days about 6000 in which Xrumer is pitched…be carefull..
all i can say that it is a rehashed garbage of black hat SEO expert Alex Coed’s ebook ‘Project Black Hat’ .
.. his usal hype }who io using his” list ” so no PPC for him to promote
a so called loop hole[ ARE YOU KIDDING] in Google not to pay PPC, will tell you how to spam other’s blogs , spam forums , spam Guestboooks , spam wikipedia and .edu and .gov forum and cloak and multi-redirect domain name to fool google bot. They instructs to use auto site generator like RSSGMAI etc to create 1000s of sites.
if you want to read his joke page http://www.officialprojectblackmask.info/project-black-mask-faq.html
he lies about the videos there are 6 not 2 and another one
on to follow on Xrumer with Alex Coed giving us the treatment !!!
so expect to sse a whole lotta sales..yep.
i bought this stuff Black Hat ,,its poorly written ,,no index .. they
didnt have the videos as promised …you pay “extra” for the videos..the book is rubbish with out these videos ..if you buy this you will have to get
Xrumer…if you want a fast buck ??? you have been warned..loop holes
get closed. .
Hey tomartomartini, you’re a dumbass. Black Mask is by the dude who did Affiliate Project X. The one you’re talking about by Alex Coed is Project Black HAT, which does not contain a video. So what did you do, read the sales letter of one and buy the other???? ROFLMAO ROFLMAO
Post more link to your forums =)
I’m adding you to my base, if you see spamm from funtikevich, you know it’s me 😉
By the way it’s nice soft and I can’t say nothing against it, have 2 data bases with 800k forums each.
Have fun guys 😉
Its a nice ploy by this software, just letting others to post links in their replies. Another peculiar problem I am facing when moderating forums is, I dont normally go through the entire post. I will just look at the title, if the title is odd or pornographic or spam or pharma related I used to delete that post.
But later I have found that several posts have normal and unsuspecting titles and body too. But the replies are quite unrelated prono or pharma related. And all these replies are made on the same day as the post. This is quite unusual. Maybe some submitter software behind this and also it may be some strategy. It adversely affected my forums.
Hi guys, stumbled on the conversation and you all seem to know what your talking about. I run a small PHPBB forum thats getting pelted with everything from pharmacuticals to homepages that queerly enough, commonly seem to end with a “map.html” extension.
I’ve been reading about these software programs and have developed a surprising respect for the authors. The end users however need a good poke in the eye among other things.
I’m utterly scunnered! Does anyone know what the best math captcha system is for PHPBB? I’ve set the board so I manually approve all new members but some of the usernames are quite offensive and sit smugly down by the “our newest registered member is” part at the bottom. A bit off topic sorry but hoping one of you guys could help a stressing brunette x
I use a mod that automatically bans an IP that tries to fill in certain profile fields when registering. Because those profile fields do not exist on my registration page. So only a robot would try to fill out something that’s not there.
I also don’t let members post links until they have 10 posts and have been a member for 7 days. These two mods have cut out almost all the spam on my forums. Both were mods for 2.0.22 PhpBB
Firstly I cannot find xrumer anywhere, Still looking and secondly this is the first person I have ever talked to that has the same first name as myself .
Thanks
hi Conrad,
tis i TAG’s Properties Master (Carole). i am admin of a bb, we have recently had a large volume of registrants. one of them posted a quarry: “Admin of bbs.roddenberry.com – what hosting or server do you use?Thanks.Sorry for my english :)” their IP shows them to be from Amsterdam, tho i believe they’re actually located in Germany. then they posted some kind of gobbley gook, looked like computer language, shortly after which, one of our older members notified me that they had gained access to the Admin\mods private forums thru the “New Posts” features. i believe we have that contained now. they haven’t spammed us yet. i checked their profile that’s where i found a link that led to a google search with a list of “buy Xrumer” sites. i went to wikipedia, saw your name and followed that link here. this has been very informative, i’ll defiantly pass this info on to our mods and tech support. i have previously blocked: mail.ru, inbox.ru, cashette.com, i hadn’t heard of gawab.com until now. i’ll block that one today.
how are things going for you? when will you be returning to our neck of the woods? it will be fun to see you again
Hi Carole,
Which software are you using for your bulletin board?
if i understand you correctly, we use: vBulletin® Version 3.6.8
i haven’t heard back from our tech support yet, they’re busy updating the site.
Dreamweaver for code editing, flash, and notepad.
but I dont think Google will detect it as spam or a penalize able tactic, as the incoming links come with ‘n’ range of anchor texts, n forums and with n contents! I find it as a decent linkbait
I usually do not comment on blog posts but I found this quite interesting, so here goes. Thanks! Regards, P.
yea nice Work 😀
Very good article 😉
Xrumer is quite good. Is it a godd idea to buy a xrumer blast for a 1 month old site?
Xrumer may be a spamming tool, but it’s not a scam. There is nothing illegal about it.
If you read the article again, you’ll notice what I called a “scam” was their original marketing ploy to get links to their site. This from the article:
Their first auto-submitted post does not contain a link, it simply says something along the lines of: “I am looking for Xrumer auto-submit software, does anyone know where I can find the official website?”
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and ensure they have common Russian email addresses blocked
I’m Russian admin of some forums. And in my practice most of xrumer’s spam-users come with gmail addresses rather than Russian free mailboxes.
And as I know it’s typical for spammers to use gmail. And latest xrumer’s version is able to pass automatically through gmail and hotmail captcha, so there will be zillions of gmail and hotmail new spam accounts.
Apparently Xrumer can also bypass captcha’s, so until the forum developers figure a way to release a proper anti-spam feature to combat these spamming programs, this problem will still exist in years to come.
LOL at the Computer Misuse Act – how is it illegal to use a software for an automatic blog posting, forum posting, blog creating and article marketig? So, if I manually copy and paste the following comment on 100 blogs (or forums): “it is a very nice blog I will come back to read more” will I be send to jail as well? How is that illegal?
Askland – Great post. I was looking for some xrumer and ran into your article. Great info!
But I have a quick question. What if a competitor wants to use this against me. Would that cause damage to my site?
I realize that backlink software is mentioned. I just received an email pertaining to BacklinkBrigand com; This is new computer software with seemingly excellent attributes: It posts to more than twenty-three distinct platforms and it’s possible to teach new targets on top of that. Could anyone express his own review of this application? Many thanks
very good report! I am so sick and tired of hearing about this garbage scam and seeing everyone using it. Even on sites like freelanceer, scriptlance so many scammers pushing it on there and they get away with it!
It is absolutely ridiculous we run many phpbb forums and they attempt to hit us so much but there is a simple fix for your phpbb forum just add an extra captcha an always changing question for guests or new registers! just always keep changing or adding new questions if needed. make them pretty easy questions. the stupid bots can never know what your question will be. when you ask math questions be sure to change numbers up with number form , and written form. get creative with your question captchas. then the image captcha you can modify it to beat it as well.
P.S.
F*K Xrumer I go and put my link on alot of the websites they try and spam me with if they are actually decent sites LOL
so we in fact get links on their clients sites and they get denied from our forums HA 🙂
I don’t like to use black hat seo, I think the era of it will finish soon