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Dear Gamechanger Community,

It has come to our attention that there has been a recent uptick in 'Parasite SEO' activities. 

Google's algorithm update on May 5th has introduced a manual penalty for reputation abuse, targeting sites that permit such activities.

While our community has been diligent in removing these posts (fortunately, most of the spam is being picked up by the built-in spam prevention feature), the residual visibility in search results poses a risk to our site's reputation and could potentially attract penalties. We have also blacklisted email domains of the spamming accounts; however, quite often, they manage to create the spamming post before the Zapier integration bans the account.

I would like to ask what steps you are taking in your communities to prevent such incidents?

Thank you, Grzegorz

Following cause i’d also love to learn more here!

Also curious about this. The way it reads makes me think there is a bit of a grace period and it’s not an instant thing. It’s aimed at the websites that let spam content fester.

One thing we’ve been doing is using Zapier to check all topics and replies for URLs. If the URL is not part of the Calendly domain, we get alerted in a special Slack channel that we potentially have spam with a preview of the URL. We’ve been able to get rid of uncaught spam much faster because of this.

Also experimenting with AI too to see if we can get it to help us proactively identify AI generated content, spammy content, and hidden spam. It’s good at spammy content, alright at hidden spam, but doesn’t seem to be able to recognize stuff it might have generated.

We have a process that automatically posts to Slack when someone signs up with a gmail, hotmail, outlook, etc address. We also run it through the StopForumSpam.com API to check if that email or username has been reported before.

We don’t automatically apply a ban. Maybe we should. Because of timezones most of these signups occur in the middle of our night and we don’t see them until the next day. I worry about banning a legitimate user, though.

 

Thank you kindly for all the valuable input so far. All those measures are defiantly good to have, and we will check how we could implement similar steps as well.

One thing that we’ve been advised is that once the pages are deleted, a removal request for that specific URL should be made to Google Search Console to prevent the deleted page from continuing to appear in SERPs 

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