XRumer

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "XRumer" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

XRumer is a piece of software made for spamming^[1] online forums and comment sections. It is marketed as a program for search engine optimization and was created by BotmasterLabs. It is able to register and post to forums (forum spam) with the aim of boosting search engine rankings. The program is able to bypass security techniques commonly used by many forums and blogs to deter automated spam, such as account registration, client detection, many forms of CAPTCHAs, and e-mail activation before posting. The program utilises SOCKS and HTTP proxies in an attempt to make it more difficult for administrators to block posts by source IP, and features a proxy checking tool to verify the integrity and anonymity of the proxies used.

Xrumer paved the way for a slew of link spamming software, such as GSA Search Engine Ranker, Money Robot, Seo Autopilot, and Seo Neo. The latest version of the software (Xrumer 23 StrongAI in June 2024) utilizes AI technology to create spam content, solve graphical CAPTCHAs, answer questions, and other automated tasks.

In addition, the software can avoid the suspicions of forum administrators by first registering to make a post in the form of a question which mentions the spam product ("Where can I get...?"), before registering another account to post a spam link which mentions the product. The side effect of these innocent-looking posts is that helpful forum visitors may search on a search engine (e.g. Google) for the product and themselves post a link to help out, thus bolstering the product's Google ranking without falling afoul of forum posting policies. The software is also capable of avoiding detection by making posts in off-topic, spam and overflow sections of forums, thus attempting to keep its activities in high activity low content areas of the targeted forum. However, there are other platforms used to spam to, which includes website comment spam.