Wouldn't make a difference: Google couldn't see us at all for about five months while we were dealing with the last abusive traffic problem and spam went up: the spray and pray is so profitable that they don't even bother checking. There's just no reliable way to get Google to penalize a URL in a way that any of these people will notice. We already do a ton of things that signal "this is malicious SEO" to Google and it makes no difference in our spam volume, and anything else we did would start having problems for legitimate users trying to index their journals through Google. The only thing that's effective is preventing the account creation in the first place or suspending the accounts as fast as they're made. (Hilariously, a good percentage of the spammers then write in to us to demand that we unsuspend them because they didn't violate the ToS. About three months ago I started noticing that a good 80% of the emails are now written by ChatGPT. It's grimly hysterical.)
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Wouldn't make a difference: Google couldn't see us at all for about five months while we were dealing with the last abusive traffic problem and spam went up: the spray and pray is so profitable that they don't even bother checking. There's just no reliable way to get Google to penalize a URL in a way that any of these people will notice. We already do a ton of things that signal "this is malicious SEO" to Google and it makes no difference in our spam volume, and anything else we did would start having problems for legitimate users trying to index their journals through Google. The only thing that's effective is preventing the account creation in the first place or suspending the accounts as fast as they're made. (Hilariously, a good percentage of the spammers then write in to us to demand that we unsuspend them because they didn't violate the ToS. About three months ago I started noticing that a good 80% of the emails are now written by ChatGPT. It's grimly hysterical.)