kartooner

Yeah I agree. I’ve been track­ing this kind of stuff for a while (think I men­tioned it a few weeks ago on my site) I can’t see why peo­ple think this will work because site own­ers who check refer­ral logs are pretty clued up (for the most part) and are not going to be very happy about the sit­u­a­tion. Google doesn’t track my ref­e­r­eal logs to it can’t be for ranking.

I think I’ve only blocked two domains and an IP range so far…but it seems to be on the increase. Still it takes me two secs to block them for­ever from my site.

I have to admit though, it doesn’t help my seething annoy­ance either.

by Gary on September 6, 2004 at 12:35 am. Reply #

BTW, it’s spelled “refer­ral”, not “refer­rel”. To be hon­est, “refer­rel”, sounds like a weird fer­ret to me.

by Jarek Piórkowski on September 6, 2004 at 8:41 am. Reply #

This is pre­cisely why I chose to mon­i­tor com­ments before pub­lish­ing on my site, after being badly burned by the Via­gra, Cialis and gay porn evils. This sucks, since it is an extra chore and kills the instant pub­lish­ing grat­i­fi­ca­tion fac­tor — but even if I were using a black­list fil­ter, it’s not like I’m will­ing to take any chances with it.

That’s not the worst part how­ever — That is the fact that many clients –of which I could name some we’ve had but I rather don’t– would how­ever be will­ing to pay the 75 bucks for that “mass refer­rer spam­mer” with­out think­ing twice, des­per­ate as they are of hit­ting #1 in Google rank­ings, as if that were the solu­tion for their posi­tion­ing problems.

by beto on September 6, 2004 at 12:44 pm. Reply #

What winds me up about these referal spam pro­grams is, they just don’t work! I’ve spo­ken to a num­ber of blog/website own­ers and they ALL keep a close eye on the com­ments and refer­als they recieve and take swift action to remove the offend­ing spam before it has a chance to do the spam­mer any good..

I’ve never used referal spam, I’ve never needed to. I find good con­tent and seman­tic markup will usu­ally give you the edge in the search results every time.

by Richard@Home on September 7, 2004 at 1:25 am. Reply #

Richard: Your last para­graph hit it on the head; good use of seman­tics will always push your site ahead of the rest and all with­out a mass spam­mer pro­gram. I’ve seen sites that I’ve devel­oped get rank­ings within two or three days of going live. Amaz­ing what clean code can do.

As for your gra­vatar, I think it’s great. It reminds me of the tree char­ac­ters in Norse myths somewhat.

by kartooner on September 7, 2004 at 8:35 am. Reply #

Block­ing IPs or domains is a like fight­ing man­u­ally against robots.

The only way to stop from being refer­ral spammed is to check your ref­er­ers before pub­lish­ing them. It might be per­haps done auto­mat­i­cally using the link check mech­a­nisms of ping­back or track­back. By the way, the tech­nic can also be used to tell the spam­mer what you think about him
< ?php
$limit=100000;
$user_agent=“We love refer­ral spam”;
$referrer=“http://dont.exist.here”;
$tracefile=”/dev/null”;
$trace­han­dle = fopen($tracefile, “ab”)

while ($c < $limit) {
$c++;
echo “$c “;
$ch = curl_init(‘http://www.adminshop.com/reffy.php’);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,$user_agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER,$referrer);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$dummy=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
fclose($tracehandle);
?>

by Marcel from Traffic Statistic on September 7, 2004 at 5:26 pm. Reply #

To Bill:
Do you think, that being silent about secu­rity prob­lems will solve them?

Bet­ter widely pub­lish the prob­lem, so that web­mas­ters and web sta­tis­tics devel­op­ers will be aware of the prob­lem and pro­tect their sites or change the han­dling of ref­er­ers in their sta­tis­tics soft­ware. Since the Jin­nee is out of the bot­tle now that will be the only way to get it back into the bottle.

Dis­play­ing unchecked Ref­erer header URIs as links to the admin or even to the pub­lic is a secu­rity flaw, and that shall be fixed.Reef at least will have the effect, that the authors of the first one won’t earn money with their rubbish.

by Marcel on September 12, 2004 at 7:20 am. Reply #

Umm, I have been suf­fer­ing from refer­ral spam since the late 90’s (1997 at least, before the blog craze). It is not a new phe­nonema, it has been haunt­ing web­mas­ters for many years!

by Dave on February 17, 2005 at 1:26 am. Reply #

I just want to thank all of you who put up infor­ma­tion on block­ing refer­ral spam.

I don’t have a blog, I have a med­ical forum. For some rea­son since July I have been being bom­barded by this stuff. I have been going through stats and cpanel block­ing IP adresses.

I fig­ured there has to be a bet­ter way, so I have been search­ing tons on this crap. Now I just need to learn how to do this via the htac­cess and mod rewrite.

thanks for the time that every­one who is try­ing to beat this beast is putting into their web sites and blogs.

by deb on October 21, 2005 at 7:47 pm. Reply #