What's this for?

[KCollins]

What benefit does this glean for them? The spammers?

[jsburger]

The more instances of their web site that exist moves their site higher on search engine results.

[HopefulSSer]

Right -- the way I understand it is that it's a way to game search results. They bury links to their sites wherever they can and it makes their site appear more legit & popular so it gets ranked higher in the search results.

I've been making a bit of a game finding them. If there's a 1-post newbie who resurrects an old thread, there's either spam hidden in their (usually vague) post, or they'll make the post without a link then come along later and add one

[KCollins]

good grief.

[jsburger]

Right -- the way I understand it is that it's a way to game search results. They bury links to their sites wherever they can and it makes their site appear more legit & popular so it gets ranked higher in the search results.

I've been making a bit of a game finding them. If there's a 1-post newbie who resurrects an old thread, there's either spam hidden in their (usually vague) post, or they'll make the post without a link then come along later and add one

Yes, I am always suspicious of the 1-post newbie who resurrects an old thread but I have not been able to see the hidden links. However, if you quote the SPAMER's post in the editor you can see them. So the way from now on is just to quote the suspicious post to check for links but don't actually post it to the forum..

One thing to note, if you quote a post with a hidden link and then post that message to the forum the link will not show up but it is still there. It is only visible in the editor. In the other thread that RFGuy is talking about he quoted the SPAMER's original post. The Moderator deleted the original post but the link is still in RFGuy's quote of the post. So that defeats the deletion of the original SPAM post.