that's a thing that someone would be bothered doing here?? jeez i didnt know the theme park enthusiast market was so lucrative. I guess you just need one person to fall for your scam to make bank...
No, its intent is not to fool the actual users of the site, but the search engines that index them.
I'm no computer expert, so my understanding of this is somewhat limited - I read an article a long while ago. But from what I can tell, Google and the other big sides have this nice way to rank the "quality" of sites they've got indexed, so they can tell what is relevant to a search and what's just random garbage. One way to tell the quality of a site is to tell the quality of the sites that link to them.
Say for instance that you've got a website containing a piece of information about, say, the coasters you think are the best in the world. Google will come across your site eventually, and flag it as "it has something to do with the world's best coasters, and it exists, and that's it." Somebody searching for "the world's best coasters" would be likely to find your website on page 27 of the Google search or something.
Then imagine you want your website to rank higher on the Google search, because you know that your ad revenue will increase if your website is found on one of the first 10 pages of the Google search. One way to do that is to be
cited. Some other website must link to your page, or "cite" you. If lots of sites cite your website, it will be flagged as very relevant to the topic in question, because lots of other sites lead there. It must be talked about a lot. Respected. That's the way to end up on the first few pages on the Google search. I've heard the term "juice" being used here, but I'm not sure if it's an established term or something invented by the journalist who wrote the one article I read. Either way, it's a good allegory. If your website is cited, its's getting "relevance juice", and juice is the way to the top of the search results.
But you can't just sign up for a hundred different blog services and add a link to your website from an otherwise empty blog in each of them. Google will notice that nobody reads the blogs that cite your website, and it will be flagged as "cited by a bunch of nobodies - likely a deliberate attempt to influence the algorithm", and they would punish you for that. It's bad juice, completely without nutrients. That's the way to end up on page 65 of the search instead.
Conversely, imagine if The Guardian ran an article about the world's best coasters, and cited your website. Suddenly, you're getting traffic from a really respected source. Google notices that a really verified and trusted source cites your website, moving you way up near the top of the search. Good juice. If they cite you several times, or if Washington Post decides to jump on the "world's best coasters" bandwagon and cite you as well, you're getting lots of good juice from several good sources, high placements in the Google search results, and conversely, sweet website traffic and advertising revenue.
CF and other forums, I imagine, sits somewhere in between. We're a somewhat respected source on one topic, so even forum threads here come quite high up on the search results if you search for something coaster related. If your website is cited by a CF thread it might climb a little on the ranking. A citation from CF is decent juice. In itself it's a far cry from The Guardian, but also a far cry from those pages created exclusively to host links en masse. Even baby steps count. And if your website is cited by a thread on CF, and on TPR, and TowersTimes, and all those other forums out there, you're getting decent juice from a lot of sources. That's enough to climb the ladder a bit. If all the forums cite your website when talking about the world's best coasters, naturally Google will think you're a go-to source for that sort of topic. Note that they probably wouldn't bother much to distinguish whether the page in question has anything to do with the topic of the forum. As long as the source has a relevant keyword somewhere in the title, it's indexed. Presumably, the word "Casino" in this thread title may be enough to convince Google that we're discussing casinos in this thread, and thus they will provide a bit more juice to any linked source that talks about casinos. It's flagged as relevant to the topic at hand, and that's probably why Jan and Lisa sought it out in the first place.
I imagine a thread gives better juice if it has been active for a while, is not locked, is in a part of the forum that sees a bit of traffic, and has replies from many existing members. Perhaps it even helps if the link is posted in response to a question by another user (or it could just be to make it seem more legitimate to moderators). If Lisa or Jan had made a thread on their casino preferences somewhere in the General Polls forum where no soul ever sets foot, it would have been noticed and locked, or not given much juice at all even if we had missed it. But a thread like this is just perfect. News & Rumours gets a decent bit of traffic, so it's probably the best source of juice we have on the forums.
So the aim of the spammers is to insert links to their websites in the most legitimate pages CF has to offer, in order to give juice to their website. Now, switch the phrase "world's best coasters" for "online casino", and you may see what these schmucks were up to. They're advertising some scummy site they hope to give more juice so they can get higher up on the results of a popular Google search, and thus get more traffic.
I think there is a way to mark a page - or even a whole website - to be ignored by Google entirely in this regard. That is, a citation on the page doesn't give any juice at all. I think this is commonly used by the comment sections of large newspapers. Nobody wants to bother setting up spambots if there's no juice to be had. But I'm uncertain if that's default for forums nowadays or whether CF employs this method.
@furie or
@ECG might know.
