Referral Spam

Is anybody else getting Referral Spam on their blog? I happened to check my referral logs for the month, and I've got a pile of faked referral hits from sites that have never linked to me (a bunch of DVD sales sites, some Poker sites, several sites that sell watches, etc...). I won't give the URLs here because that would just give them more publicity, but looking at my AWStats page, most of my top 30 links from external pages are coming from spam sites, and I have a feeling it's not helping the speed of my site.

Looking online, it appears I'm not alone in this. The reason? Because these folks are hoping your blog is running a script that displays that latest referrals to your site. So they'll fake a referral link to have their link appear on your site (increasing their page rank, giving them a link, etc...).

Anybody have any solutions for blocking these morons, or am I just going to have to start turning off my referral logs (which I'd like to avoid, in case I ever feel the need to ego surf)?

Posted by Jake on 12/29/04 @ 11:09 AM
Posted in Geekdom | 8 Comments | Permalink

8 Comments

Josh said on 12/29/04 @ 11:43 AM:
Sadly enough, spammers and scammers are some of the most creative and ingenious people. They seem to be able to find every way possible to bug the crap out of normal computer users.

Neil T. said on 12/29/04 @ 01:42 PM:
Yeah, I get them as well. I think you can block them by rejecting referrals where the referring URL contains words like poker and viagra, etc., but it can be a bit clunky.

It's done because some sites publicly list their referrals and it's an easy way to get PageRank. Like comment/trackback spam.

Dave M. said on 12/29/04 @ 02:27 PM:
Yep, I get anywhere from 1500-3000 a month. All kinds of porn sites. For a while I was using .htaccess to block them, but I would get about 5-10 new ones a day, so I finally just gave up and let them through.

I used to have a referral page, but I have long since abandoned that page and will never show it again.

Lately, I have been getting people manually entering in comment spam. ExpressionEngine uses a Captcha system to block bots from putting in comment spam, but I have had several people manually entering in comment spam. I find that amusing, but still delete them as soon as I see them added.

Radnesin said on 12/29/04 @ 02:51 PM:
By having your awstats page link to them, you're giving them exactly what they want.

Jake said on 12/29/04 @ 02:53 PM:
But my AWStats page isn't public, it's behind a password protected shield, so I doubt that that is their intention.

Radnesin said on 12/29/04 @ 02:53 PM:
Oops. You're not actually linking to your awstats page. never mind! :)

Ozguru said on 12/29/04 @ 10:11 PM:
If you check the "referrals" (the dodgy ones) they are not to real pages on your site. I simply block the IP for 24 hours of every dodgy referrer. That works easily because in general they send a couple of hundred at a time and when the site "vanishes" (from their perspective) they eventually notice and go elsewhere.

With a little bit of coding you can implement a three times system (after three suspensions, ban the IP forever).

When I got a permanent IP (for one month before I gave up) the fake referrers accounted for 12Gb of my 8Gb limit - fortunately I have an understanding ISP.

alek said on 01/01/05 @ 11:20 AM:
These guys suck - no doubt about that - I have a whole page on referrer log spamming.

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