Common passwords used for spam accounts?
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This is a bit of a longshot.
I know that many of the spam forum accounts, blog posts etc that have in the past been used for SEO are generated automatically. Does anyone know of any common passwords that are often used when setting up these accounts?
I only ask as, trying to clean up the backlink profile for my website, I found myself in desperation keying in random passwords trying to access the spam accounts created on various forums by our former SEO agency. Eventually I got lucky and worked out the password for a series of forum accounts was, not very imaginatively, 'seo'. Having worked out this, I was able to delete the spam signatures on about 10 forums. But there are many other accounts where I have no idea of the password used.
I guess I'm just wondering if there are standard stock passwords used in the past by many SEOs? Not likely to get an answer to this one, I know, but worth a shot.
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One sneaky trick that your competitors don't want you to know about...
I could really use that headline with this. Imagine things this way, you are doing backlink profiling on a competitor that ranks above you. You see that he has a bunch of spammy forums posts. But no matter what you do, you cannot out rank him. So you start forum spamming yourself to try to catch him in the SERPS. But then you get a penalty.
The disavow tool has more than one use really. It will let Google know not to penalize you for links (or give you credit) but it will also mask your link profile too. I would just disavow them and be done with it. Let you competitors try to figure out what Google is giving you credit for or is not.
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