For the last 4 months I have noticed the amount of referrer spam increase on my friends website that I help with now and again. Referrer spam isn’t new and has been about for years. With sophisticated technologies arising to protect our email inboxes/blog comments/ping backs, spammers need to use every other way possible to lure “a victim”.
For anyone not familiar with this type of spam:
Referrer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam
Chances are you’ll never notice the small gremlins coming in trying to make you click the link as your intrigued as to why such a website will be linking to you, but should you need a solution to prevent this type of things happening then there are solutions out there.
If you’re using a php based platform.
For anyone using an asp.net based.
- ReverseDOS – used by subtext and many other blogging engines.
- Checkout a post by Mads Kristensen about blocking ip addresses that could be enhanced to talk to a “blacklist” of known spammers.Site has gone?
If you have a list of top referrers on your site then chances are you’ll be targeted to try and get that nasty url in your list if you have nothing moderating the requests.
