OOAK Table Tennis Forum

So... a spammer was advertising rubbish... in ... Perthshire. On this forum?

So let's just do the maths....

The population of Perthshire is about 130,000 people.

The population of the UK is about 53 million. There are 25000 members of Table Tennis England. That's 0.047% of the population. Of the 25000 people in TTE, let's be generous and say 1% use or read this forum. That's about 250 people, or 0.00047% of the population of England.

So... using the same approach to Perthshire, which is slightly more than 400 times less populous, we can suggest that 250/400 people, or 5/8ths of a person might read this. Maybe. Is that worthwhile for a spammer?

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Spammer gone..... (blows smoke from gun)

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Yes, but:
1. How many other forums have been similarly rubbish spammed, eg golf, fishing or ...?
2. How much has it cost the rubbish spammer? Hint, almost nothing.
3. You need to go on from the 5/8 of a person to what proportion of possible victims, er customers will actually do anything based on the rubbish spam. I think you will find that .625 of a person dwindles to oh .000625 of a person.

Rubbish spam is rubbish.

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Spamming on forums is nothing to do with the prospect of the target market reading the post and following the link. The reason spammers build links is to try to fool Google into rating the linked website higher. As far as I'm aware Google changed their algorithm so that spammy links don't work any more but at one time ranking on Google was all about the number of sites linking in.

Oh and a pedant speaks - the population of the UK is 64 million not 53 million (or possibly 59 million if the "Yes" voters get their way).

This is important to be aware of, and also a good reason to generally avoid replying to a spam post (although it may be tempting... I do it myself sometimes... )

Note this common strategy:

• Enter seemingly on-topic posts, often with useless or copied content.
• Wait until the threads drop down into oblivion (errr... off screen on the forum topic list)
• Insert a link into signature.

That link will then occur on all the posts where the spammer has enabled the signature.

Hardly any user, and not even all forum moderators, will notice the link occurring, because it is not a new post. However, any web crawler (i.e. all search engines) will pick it up.

Now redo the maths of spam...