That's partly true. But the reason a forum gets on their radar in the first place is by failing to follow those safeguards.
The way these guys operate is they write scripts to crawl the SERPs and find sites that are ranking, then they look for weaknesses (i.e. outbound followed links that don't go through a redirect).
Or they look at their spammy competitor's backlinks with AHrefs, Majestic, etc. and discover the forum that way. Then they help themselves to a link.
The way these guys operate is they write scripts to crawl the SERPs and find sites that are ranking, then they look for weaknesses (i.e. outbound followed links that don't go through a redirect).
Or they look at their spammy competitor's backlinks with AHrefs, Majestic, etc. and discover the forum that way. Then they help themselves to a link.