Comments on: Referer Spamming is Back!

By: Phil Ringnalda

Phil Ringnalda — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 04:35:36 +0000

Didn’t I see somewhere during the last flood of referer spamming that some of them were doing it by making their visitors do the work? Just throw a 1x1 iframe in your page, with a random URL from a file of addresses to spam (oh, say, from the weblogs.com changes.xml file), and all your freeloading pr0n-seekers do your referer spamming for you. Not quite as slick as the “decode this CAPTCHA (which will get me another free spam email account somewhere) to get your free pr0n” scam, but still quite inventive, for slime.

By: tankspackular

tankspackular — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 16:09:05 +0000

yeah, i get A LOT of referrer spams. i didn’t really understand it at all until i read this, so thanks! most of mine are from porn sites or paris hilton sex tapes @ blogspot. hahahaa. very odd.

By: Geof

Geof — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:14:50 +0000

Persactly. I pass-protected my referral logs [not from Apache, but from Dean Allen's Refer script] so I was the only one seeing them; I really seemed to become a target only when I was making them public. :shrug:

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:08:40 +0000

Many web sites show a list of web sites that people visited just before visiting theirs — normally termed referal sites as they referred the user with a link. Such “recent referral” sections are a nice way of crosslinking websites and building a nice web of realted sites. My website has such a section (cheap plug!).

Referral spamming is caused by a script/bot making fake site referals in an attempt to generate traffic to another site. Its basically a form of advertising and something thats annoying.

Mike, could you email me the referral link and I’ll scan my logs. The referer page might have some javascript or image link causing the referal. Hmm, I think or just come up with a nice way of generating referrals

By: mike

mike — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 14:54:07 +0000

Hi Paul, the intention is that sites which display their referers, e.g. in statistics pages, or as is often done on blogs, right there on the page, will lend ‘Page Rank’ to the spammers site. The irony in my case is two fold. I no longer display my referers and I have just lost all my page rank because of the URI change.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 13:37:32 +0000

I dont understand refferer spamming, what exactly is the point? Who does it effect?

By: Geof

Geof — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 13:31:02 +0000

Yeah, I’ve seen a large growth in it, too.