Where some of that referrer spam comes from

This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.

[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.

Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.

Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.

Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.

If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.

Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.

Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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