spamming referral lists
Wired News: When the Spam Hits the Blogs
Owners of the conversational websites known as weblogs have recently noticed that their referral logs have become the newest target for spam.
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Oh yes, I’ve been noticing this more and more. I’ll go to a site and it will be nothing at all related, with no link to my site anywhere. The other day, there was referrals for a porn site in my referral list!!
Comments
The sad thing is that is the reason why I don’t have a referal log and I like to keep my MT system preaty basic with just pure XHTML. Once I start to see spam in comments I will have to turn them off and make them selective. Another thing is that if you have a reciently comment on list and if you get a post that gets super popular like when my blog was talked about on a radio talk show or your site shows up on Metafiler, Slashdot or Fark the reciently commented on list rebuilds your main page alot and you eat up more bandwidth. A site I love was Metafiltered and they now face a $1500 bandwith bill
Posted by: Jake | November 19, 2002 10:21 AM
Same here. I’ve been noticing such things on my referrer logs. Usually, I’ve gotten pretty good at filtering those out mentally by using a simple sequence of logical steps...
Posted by: lashlar | November 19, 2002 03:06 PM
I’ve noticed the same thing at my site too, but only with the voodoomagic site so far. I get fake referrals from them on my stats page almost every day. The referring site will be that one with things like siteoftheweek.html and favoritesite.html as the filename, and they always show up as having referred 7 visitors to my site. It’s weird.
Posted by: Brandy W. | November 19, 2002 07:03 PM
Yup - I’ve noticed too. Grrr! I HATE SPAM!
Posted by: Shanni | November 19, 2002 09:56 PM
The ones I had were from stuff like ad.mastodonte.com or something like that. They always show up as having three or four visitors.
Posted by: lashlar | November 20, 2002 02:44 PM
Kristine, I’ve been getting some of this spam and apparently Rannie has too. I mentioned your post in his comments. P.S. I love that I remembered when you wrote about this was able to go directly to your post.
Posted by: Marie | December 4, 2002 09:26 PM