Why Do People Send In Fake Form Submissions?

[damon1212]

I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . .  ).  It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense.

Does anyone know why people do this?  Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form.

I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .

[EGOL]

Might be Google knocking.... 

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-fills-out-forms-crawls-results-13760

[blackballonline]

Nice Find on that article and Congrats on the Guru status

[blackballonline]

We are starting to see the comment spammers come out again with refined tactics because of the Panda Effect. Does your form allow comments on a blog? or deeper access? Bots and Hacks are always looking for a way in.

[EGOL]

Thanks Dave.

That article surprised me.  I never expected google to have robots trained to hack at forms.  I wonder how many other robots are out there stuffing data into forms?

[damon1212]

Ha!  Somehow I don't think my site has garnered that level of interest from Google yet . . .

[damon1212]

I don't think it does anything other than send me a response via email, but I will check with the designer to make sure it is not allowing anything.  It has a section for "comments", but that's just so they can clarify the quote info to me.

[SteveOllington]

I would place my money on Xrumer and other such software... we get it loads too.

Some might even be hack attempts with SQL injection but probably not too often.

Xrumer is pretty good at beating captcha's (I've heard lol ;p), so you'll need to define your own actual questions if you want to stop it... i.e. "What colour the sky?" is one, but it's learnt that and others like it, so you need more personalized ones. The best are "What is the first word on the homepage of this site?" as of course it can't guess that, and it can't follow the instructions to go find out

[damon1212]

Have you considered using a captcha program?  I assume there's a cost involved to get that setup . . . I've never really looked into it.

Jeez  . . . how sad/dedicated are we lurking on SEOMoz on Memorial Day . .. .

[SteveOllington]

Sorry, that's what I mean. Captcha programs are ineffective much of the time against Xrumer. For other software there's services such as decaptcha, beatcaptcha, etc.. some services read the screen and take their best guess, some use actual people in what I can only imagine are sweatshops to enter captchas manually for you, but Xrumer doesn't need that stuff. It's smart, it learns... and many who use it combine it's knowledge with files so that it learns even more.

That's what I mean, the only way to stay ahead of it is your own personalized captchas (ones that alternate).

[laurenmledbury]

I have seen this lately on one of my clients' sites. The other thing I can help but wonder about is in doing research in Compete on search referrals to various sites, suddenly much of the data is total nonsense. For example, here are some of the top terms supposedly generating traffic to a popular inbound marketing site:

medical coding

tn real estate

bankruptcy lawyer ventura ca

auto detailing boston

Or could this be the result of URL masking? Some sites results are complete nonsense, so that I can't tell that they get any legitimate search.