Spam referrers and other weird spam-like behaviours

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Blogging
April 15th, 2004 • 4:48 am

Thanks to John Gruber’s post on his new Preferences page, I now know why I keep seeing the URLs of various porn sites in my referrers log, as if these porn sites were actually referring to my blog pages.

It turns out that it’s apparently a spam-like strategy intended to increase the page ranking of these porn sites in Google. But that assumes that my blog lists referrers — which it doesn’t. Weird.

The other spam-like behaviour I have noticed lately is that I keep getting member registrations from @mail.ru users, with user names consisting of one or more exclamation marks and URLs referring to (apparently) popular sites about Russia. Since these (fake?) members never post any (spam) comments on my blog, I fail to see what the member registrations are for. In any case, I have deleted all these members and blocked the corresponding IP addresses, which seems to have stemmed the flow for now.

This is all rather strange, but fortunately relatively harmless stuff. I sure hope it doesn’t become a recurring problem, though. pMachine doesn’t have any facilities of batch deleting fake member registrations.


One Response to “Spam referrers and other weird spam-like behaviours”

  1. Evan Gross says:

    I’ve noticed something like this in my web stats referrers as well. Not totally sure it’s exactly the same thing, but I see hits from URLs like full-information_dot_biz, we-have-a-solution_dot_com, help-for-this_dot_net and other similar non-entities. Following these links usually leads to a “this domain for sale” type page.

    Just started happening 2 or 3 months ago. Guess I should see if I can configure Webalizer to ignore these somehow.

    I can’t see how this can increase their Google rankings, since they aren’t actually displayed anywhere on my site, and the only way to see them is to view the referrers list generated from my server logs.

    What’s with this?

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.