New forums and spam. Good or bad??
 

Normally I would say spammers are totally obnoxious and do nothing but make my life difficult, but I had some thoughts on the other hand recently and I am curious to know what the rest of you think about it.

Been running vB on many sites for several years now. I always do my best to set up spam prevention measures.

However, I recently launched a new forum (see siggy) and am in the early stages of bringing in traffic and getting in the search engine rankings. We all know that the more traffic your site gets, the more important engines such as google perceive your site to be. When I'm starting a site, I always tell myself it's a good sign when you see the spammers start to show up. This tells me the word is getting out. It might not be to the people I want, but spammers are traffic just the same. At first I thought to ban them all right off the bat, but then I got to thinking... why not let them stay? All posts are moderated so they just keep posting garbage that no one else sees and I delete it. A little more work on my part, but am I correct in thinking their traffic should help my situation? You might ask, why do they keep coming back if you're not posting their posts? Well, they are posting their urls in their member profiles. Should I stop them from posting urls in their profiles?

Anyway, I am getting more and more new spam members every day. So more traffic... higher importance in Google's eyes right?

What are your thoughts on this??