Common practice for removing URL's?

[sweeps78]

Hi,

I'm almost embarrased at how much of a newbie I must sound with this, but......

Recently I had a spammer create a blog post in our forums that we didn't catch right away. Unfortunately, by the time we caught it, the blog post URL had already been linked to on several other sites, along with it being indexed in all the major search engines

My question is what is the standard practice when a spam post gets indexed like this? I issued a removal request from Google and blocked the URL via a Robots.txt file, but that doesn't really cover too much, not to mention all of the spam sites that linked to this blog post URL. Surprisingly, I've never had to deal with this up till now, so I have no clue how to handle it Should I create a 404 page for this? If so, are there tools in the vBulletin system that allow me to do this?

thanks!

[Jake Bunce]

If you remove the post then the search engines will eventually remove the dead link.

The ideal is to stop the spam bots from even registering. You can use one of the human verification options:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Human Verification Manager (on the left, not the right)

The Q&A option can be very effective. Note that the "image verification" option isn't very effective anymore since some bots are programmed to read those images.