Why Do People Send In Fake Form Submissions?
-
I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . . ). It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense.
Does anyone know why people do this? Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form.
I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .
-
I have seen this lately on one of my clients' sites. The other thing I can help but wonder about is in doing research in Compete on search referrals to various sites, suddenly much of the data is total nonsense. For example, here are some of the top terms supposedly generating traffic to a popular inbound marketing site:
medical coding
tn real estate
bankruptcy lawyer ventura ca
auto detailing boston
Or could this be the result of URL masking? Some sites results are complete nonsense, so that I can't tell that they get any legitimate search.
-
Sorry, that's what I mean. Captcha programs are ineffective much of the time against Xrumer. For other software there's services such as decaptcha, beatcaptcha, etc.. some services read the screen and take their best guess, some use actual people in what I can only imagine are sweatshops to enter captchas manually for you, but Xrumer doesn't need that stuff. It's smart, it learns... and many who use it combine it's knowledge with files so that it learns even more.
That's what I mean, the only way to stay ahead of it is your own personalized captchas (ones that alternate).
-
Have you considered using a captcha program? I assume there's a cost involved to get that setup . . . I've never really looked into it.
Jeez . . . how sad/dedicated are we lurking on SEOMoz on Memorial Day . .. .
-
I would place my money on Xrumer and other such software... we get it loads too.
Some might even be hack attempts with SQL injection but probably not too often.
Xrumer is pretty good at beating captcha's (I've heard lol ;p), so you'll need to define your own actual questions if you want to stop it... i.e. "What colour the sky?" is one, but it's learnt that and others like it, so you need more personalized ones. The best are "What is the first word on the homepage of this site?" as of course it can't guess that, and it can't follow the instructions to go find out
-
I don't think it does anything other than send me a response via email, but I will check with the designer to make sure it is not allowing anything. It has a section for "comments", but that's just so they can clarify the quote info to me.
-
Ha! Somehow I don't think my site has garnered that level of interest from Google yet . . .
-
Thanks Dave.
That article surprised me. I never expected google to have robots trained to hack at forms. I wonder how many other robots are out there stuffing data into forms?
-
We are starting to see the comment spammers come out again with refined tactics because of the Panda Effect. Does your form allow comments on a blog? or deeper access? Bots and Hacks are always looking for a way in.
-
Nice Find on that article and Congrats on the Guru status
-
Might be Google knocking....
http://searchengineland.com/google-now-fills-out-forms-crawls-results-13760
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does google know if rich snippet reviews are fake?
According to: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews - all someone has to do is add in some html code and write the review. How does google do any validation on whether these reviews are legitimate or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke0 -
What are effective ways of finding people to link to my blog post?
So I spent ages creating amazing content and have loads of interest in it from my social media and people visiting my site are reading deep into it. I have so far not been able to get anyone to link to it. What am I doing wrong???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
Hi! My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage. I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud. Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 199580 -
Hackers are selling fake 'Likes' on FB, Instragram
An interesting article on how to get social media buzz: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/fake-instagram-likes_n_3769247.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser0 -
Where can i see ejemple of disavow files to adapt mine in order to send to google
Can i send a disavow file to google as CSV file. Where can i see ejemple of disavow files to adapt mine in order to send to google
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How to transform an excel file on a txt file to send the Google Dissavow
I have a disallow file made on excel with lots of columns off information. I want to transform to txt file saving it from excel, but the result file seems understandable Can someone helpme on how to transform an excel file on the Google Dissavow file format for the final import
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
A Straight Answer to Outsourcing Backlinking, Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking
Hey SEOmoz Community! I've spent a bit of time now reading about SEO in books as well as online here within the SEOmoz community. However, I've still struggled to find a straight answer to whether or not directory submissions to non-penalized websites is acceptable.I suspect the reason I haven't found a straight YES or NO answer is because it isn't so straightforward and I respect that. My dilemma is as follows: I want to raise the domain authority for a few websites that I optimize for. I've submitted and gotten listed a bunch of excellent backlinks, however it still is a painfully slow process. My clients understandably want to see results faster, and because they have virtually no past outsourced link-building campaigns, I am beginning to think that I can invest some money for outsourcing directory submissions. I see more and more people talking about the latest Penguin updates, and how many of these sites are now penalized. BUT, is there any harm to submitting to directories such as the ones on SEOmoz's spreadsheet that aren't penalized? My concern is that in the future these will be penalized anyways, and is there a chance then that my site will also be de-listed from Google? At what point does Google completely 'blacklist' your site from its engine? Furthermore, I don't understand how Google can penalize a website to the point of de-listing it, because what would prevent other competitors from sending mass spammy back-links to another? What it all comes down to: At this point, are verified mass directory submissions through outsourcing still much more beneficial than detrimental to the ranking of a website? Thanks SEOmoz community, Sheldon
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | swzhai0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0