Comments on: Referral Spam

By: kartooner

kartooner — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 03:28:32 +0000

Good to hear that Deb.

I hope you can rid yourself of this spam issue once and for all, or at the very least eradicate 99% of it.

By: deb

deb — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:47:26 +0000

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: kartooner

kartooner — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:17:14 +0000

Dave: Oh yeah, I know just what you mean. I wasn't announcing that referral spam was anything new but that I had been receiving it in bulk more often than what I was already receiving previously. With blogging sites, like this one, it's just become easier to do and more profitable.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 05:26:04 +0000

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: Ranking Blog

Ranking Blog — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 17:03:29 +0000

Referer Spam: A Bloggers nightmare
Ed Costello has a great article on Blocking Referer Spam which has become a problem for the weblog community. Referal Spam definitly falls in the Bad SEO catagory and I’m working on compiling a list of known referer spammers that bloggers can pull in …

By: Marcel

Marcel — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 11:20:49 +0000

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: Bill Thayer

Bill Thayer — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 22:41:11 +0000

By: Elliott C. Back, Cornell Student

Elliott C. Back, Cornell Student — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:30:35 +0000

Reffy, Referer Spam Tool

By: Matt Burris

Matt Burris — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 04:32:23 +0000

I was getting referral spam for an URL that doesn’t exist, mod_rewrite was redirecting the spammers to archives/general/refer/index.php which isn’t a page at all. Yet they were showing up in my referral list, 150 times or more a day. I put it off, thinking it’d go away, but it got worse, so I tried to figure out ways to stop them and/or piss them off. What I came up with is to password protect archives/general/refer — which effectively cut my referral spam down to 0 a day. I’m wondering how much it affects the spammer using an automated program. Does the program automatically click cancel, or does it stop its operating, waiting for a human user to do it? That would be nice, I bet that would piss off the spammers. :)

By: Marcel from Traffic Statistic

Marcel from Traffic Statistic — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 21:26:13 +0000

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);
?>

We have put an article on trafficstatistic, what you can do to prevent from being referral spammed.