sulfericacid

I found one that works.

Thank you

The menu itself. Where all the navigation is done. Ie: https://www.ask-a-geek.com . The “private message” link needs to be hidden from everyone unless they are signed in.

No one knows how to do this?

That’s because bots inject data into the processor itself, it doesn’t submit it through the form you are using. It submits the data pretending it IS the form so it doesn’t have to be authenticated or go through the basic error checking. That is why you can remove text fields from the forms all together and bots can still post to them as if they still exist. It’s because WordPress was not built with that security in mind. There are plugins that prevent this but it should have been a built in security check since day one.

Google doesn’t care much for blog sites and links. It doesn’t increase your pagerank all that much. They changed the algorithm a number of years ago such that linkbacks on blog or forum-type sites mean very little. Why should it help your site if you were the one who posted it?

Organic links are better. A real person linking to your site can’t be faked. 360 links also mean very little (you link to them, they link to you). That tells Google that you had to trade links instead of it being organic. You may get some clicks from blogs or forums though but it won’t help your search engine ranking.

Web bots are designed specifically for WP so they can actually submit form fields without the form existing at all. Just because the form field is missing doesn’t mean the data isn’t sent to the processor.