Our site among those listed on Turkish link spammer/hacker site?

Question

Our site is based on phpFusion

Recently we found a Turkish web page that lists the URLs of about 20 sites that all run phpFusion, along with tags PR0 through PR5 for each. "Page Rank", yes? Ours is one of those URLs -- it is tagged "PR5".

The other text on the page is a bit obscure. So I'm definitely not clear what is intended by the information on this page -- maybe that's the point. There's something about "after becoming a member... is added ... backlink..." Link spam? Does PR5 mean we're an especially good target?

We're a bit concerned because we get much more membership interest from Turkey than seems reasonable. Very few Turks would have interest in the content of our site, and those who do probably wouldn't use series-generated email addresses at sketchy domains. At this point we're manually checking all membership applications and denying those that don't seem right.

Should we be concerned about being listed? Is this a pattern associated with link-spamming? (Or what?)

Anything else we should be aware of?

Answer 1

It sounds like your site is listed as being a place where someone can get an easy link to their site. The fact they list the PageRank next to each link indicates they consider PR to be an indication of link quality. So, yes, it sounds like your site has been indicated as a place where webmasters who are chasing PR can go to get a free link.

Is this a terrible thing? No. There's no direct negative effect other then having to weed through potential spam accounts created for this purpose.

Is this annoying? Sure. But it's not much different then being listed in any directory that shows PR and there's quite a few of them out there that do that.

If these memberships are problematic you can continue to screen your memberships as you are doing now. But you may want to automate the process to make your life a bit easier. Maybe you can use geolocation or other flags to determine when someone from Turkey has registered and automatically pend their account for review. Ideally by catching and stopping followers of this link from being successful you may encourage the maintainer of that page to remove your link since getting a link from your site has become difficult if not impossible to do.