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I have a friend who's a travel agent. Right now, if you go to Google and search for international tickets, the #1 result is her site. This is a huge honking deal to her; that placement alone earns her serious money.

Travel SEO is a very competitive business.

My point: now that it's public, if you want to help this site succeed, please keep an eye out for spam.

An example:

  1. User1, who's brand-new to SE, comes in and posts a recommendation for a service. Let's call it Service1.

    One recommendation? No problem.

  2. User2, who's also brand-new to SE, shows up less than 24 hours later, goes to the same question, and posts another recommendation for Service1.

    Two? And both from brand-new users? At this point, I start to get the might-be-spam vibe.

  3. Later, User2 posts a question asking if should she stay with Service1 (the one she raved about just an hour earlier), or should she go with Service2 instead?

    Now, this could theoretically be fine, except a quick search showed that Service2, while claiming to be a consolidator, only ever refers people to Service1, and may actually be the same company.

Given that neither User1 nor User2 have posted anything on other topics, I would flag all three posts as probable spam.

The TL;DR version:

Let's all work together to keep this site clean and useful. If something looks off to you, please flag it so the mods see it as well.

Thanks!

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  • I stopped at the user2 answer with similar thoughts yesterday. I didn't flag a the time, but I didn't see the same company was already mentioned in another answer though... It's not needed to repeat the same answer twice, so flagged now.
    – fretje
    Jul 1, 2011 at 8:04
  • I was wondering the same thing (I believe my question got some of this action.)
    – Kate Gregory
    Jul 1, 2011 at 15:11
  • travel.stackexchange.com/questions/85/… - are such posts spam or not? User provide the on-topic answer, but with some advertisement there. I'm stuck :(
    – VMAtm
    Jul 5, 2011 at 7:11

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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https://travel.stackexchange.com/users/352/ella-brown - another spam user. Two answers about one portal.

She created another spam post after ban, so I will ban her for longer time this time.

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  • @Dori Oh, okay :)
    – VMAtm
    Jul 5, 2011 at 5:19
  • 2
    IIRC that's the user that copy-pasted strings from web sites and added a link to that portal site. This is clearly a professional spammer, not a potentially valuable contributor, so there's no call for niceties, just suspend the account forever or destroy it.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Aug 10, 2011 at 1:02
  • @Gilles Dori had already killed this account
    – VMAtm
    Aug 10, 2011 at 4:19
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Motorbikes in Thailand and Laos

This user posted the link to site from his profile as he found it in web. I think this is violation of our rules. Am I right?

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I've just spotted one that I think is OK, but I thought it worth checking as it may be a good example.

It's one answer on "Lord of the Rings" Tours in New Zealand and recommends a company. The username is basically the site name, so it's nice and clear, and their profile homepage is the company's site again.

In this case the answer looks largely helpful, and the fact that they're self promoting is open and obvious so it shouldn't catch anyone out. To me that seems fine, but please do educate me if I've got it wrong! :)

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