Referral Spam
Lately I’ve been checking my server logs on a frequent basis. In the past month or so I’ve been receiving a plethora of referral spam, ironically most of the spam is from sites selling “referral spam” software. One such place, which I won’t repeat the URL to prevent any additional ranking, explains on their site that they “[are] a producer and seller of scripts and applications written exclusively for webmasters and their needs.”
It’s almost laughable to even consider these so-called scripts and applications “tools” to help a webmaster “and their needs”. What needs exactly? To place higher in search results by comment or referrel spam, no thank you. I’d much rather see legitimate sites come up using legal, tried and true methods rather than shady “SEO” tactics.
The site in question sells a “Windows-based mass referrer spammer” for $75.00 and claims how easy it is to spam several thousand sites in one session, including the ultimate payload; blog sites. The description reads ” [the software] operates on textfiles with URL-lists” and get this, supposedly a text file is included which includes a list of over 3,047 active blog websites “which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR.” It’s also fast, at least according to the creator, who states that the program sends a customized HTTP header instead of actually downloading the entire website.
It’s this kind of thing that boils my blood to the extent where I’m deeply sorry for the stupidity of some human beings.
20 Comments, Comment or Ping
Gary
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.
Sep 6th, 2004
kartooner
Gary: Yeah, I’m up to speed on their shady tactics. The one problem being, and something I should add, is that my statistics are not accessible by Google. Rather, my server stats are password protected. However, I do know that some stat logs are publically accessible such as Dean’s Refer which 80% of the time are publically displayed.
I hear your frustrations and I’d love to release the URL for this particular “referrel spam” creator, but it will only add more fuel to the fire so to speak.
Sep 6th, 2004
Jarek Piórkowski
BTW, it’s spelled “referral”, not “referrel”. To be honest, “referrel”, sounds like a weird ferret to me.
Sep 6th, 2004
Richard@Home
As soon as I read your headline I KNEW who you were talking about. The scumbags have been spamming my blog for ages and has resulted in my first ever blacklisting :-(
I blogged my experiance here: If you want to advertise, lets talk…
Sep 6th, 2004
beto
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.
Sep 6th, 2004
kartooner
Richard: This particular URL will be blacklisted, I’m sure of it. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen the URL in the past couple of days.
Beto: Yes, and I too know of a few companies that wouldn’t so much as blink their eyes before purchasing the mass referral spam program. Try as I may to steer them towards legitimate ranking, they tend to want it right now and not later.
Sep 6th, 2004
Richard@Home
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.
Sep 7th, 2004
Richard@Home
BTW, this is the first time I’ve seen my Gravitar in the ‘wild’ - great stuff!
I’ll definitely be adding that feature to my new blog design. :-)
Sep 7th, 2004
kartooner
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.
Sep 7th, 2004
Eric
phpMyAdmin is a great tool. It’s actually even easier than deleting comment spam in MT. But it will become very cumbersome if this pussy excuse for software sells well. If? Of course it will sell. Even well-meaning people will buy it because they don’t really understand what it does but want better rankings. It’s easier than coding clean XHTML.
The offending domain is no longer in my referrer log.
I got to get me one of them there gravitars.
Sep 7th, 2004
Marcel from Traffic Statistic
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.
Sep 7th, 2004
Matt Burris
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. :)
Sep 8th, 2004
Bill Thayer
Post 13 should be deleted? I think we should be fighting this, not coöperating with them!
Sep 10th, 2004
Marcel
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.
Sep 12th, 2004
Dave
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!
Feb 17th, 2005
kartooner
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.
Feb 18th, 2005
deb
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.
Oct 21st, 2005
kartooner
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.
Oct 21st, 2005
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