Comments on: Referrer Spam is the New Amway

By: Grandma J

Grandma J — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:36:17 +0000

Hi, back to the Amway. Our personal household started selling it over 30 years ago when you sold the product. You demonstrated on household problems, showed how to make things easier. You did not expect to make thousands, but you got your products you really loved cheaper, your friends and family DID buy from you. As it is, I know who to go to when I run out of a favorite, I buy my laundry SA* Bioquest in the 50# boxes, several at a time for shipping price purposes, store in 5 gallon buckets. The kids like the car products, other cleaning items. As everything, we find what works great. If someone else has a better product without any hype, etc let it be so.
I am disgusted with the pyramid factor of everyone getting a cut. NOT nice, no matter what the company is.

I grew up in the late 50’s early 60’s with the household using these products, as the “friends” sold it. And they worked well. Cause you were shown everyday problem solving for the products.

By: Gabriel Mihalache

Gabriel Mihalache — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Do you realize that aproximatively 47.5% of visitors actually tried accessing “sex-with-jenna-jamison.org” after you mentioned it? (Trust me, I’m part Statistician)

Also, if the ShortStat page is publicly accessible, you’re creating PageRank for those damn sites. Referer spam is all about PageRank.

By: Dave S.

Dave S. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Refer 2.0 can sort referrers by frequency and most referrer spam has a frequency of one”

Maybe for the moment. Anything involving spammer activity has to have a big red disclaimer saying “this works right now, but the crafty bastards are hard at work finding a way to circumvent it, you can be assured.” Best suggestion is your first one, just don’t expose uncontrolled referrer stats.

I suspect there must be some reason they’re doing this, beyond simply hoping against hope someone knowledgable enough to check their referrer logs will by their crap. Perhaps there’s some sort of PageRank boost to be had from gaming referral trackers like Technorati. I haven’t seen anything to confirm this, but that they’d flood my referral log for an audience of one seems unlikely.

By: Turnip

Turnip — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree, referrer spam is stupid. But then, so are spammers, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Recently I’ve had spam comments on my WordPress blog to posts that don’t exist (due to a bug, it’s fixed in 1.2.2). What the point in that is, I have absolutely no idea, as no-one will see the comments?!?! Dumbass spammers.

By: Jemal

Jemal — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Another reason is that referrer logs, when visible to Google, can help increase the page rank of the referring page. And even if you’re the only one looking at your logs, Google may know about them.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Like Jemel said, it is likely an effort to improve “Page Rank”, as well as Alexa and Amazon A9 Ratings.

They maybe exploiting browser’s “What’s Related” and 3rd party (Google) Toolbar features.

That’s my best guess at least.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ironic that you mention Amway in this post…given that one of Amway’s founders, Jay Van Andel, passed away yesterday…

(Amway’s based here, so this passed as news in this market…)

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, very interesting news about the Amway founder, Jeremy.

Can I interest you in a set of greeting cards to help commemorate the occasion? They come in packs of 1000 and if you can just sell 20 to ten of your friends, you’ve already made your money back!

If you’re open-minded, let me know, and I’ll send you the paperwork.

By: Craig C.

Craig C. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I got hit with a referrer spam flood which was the final straw. I googled a bit and found this blacklist by Joe Maller. By adding some .htaccess rules you simply block all traffic with particular strings in the referrer header. Every time I get a spam hit, that domain goes onto the list. It's not quite as preventative as I'd like, but it stops the repeat offenders. Of course, as with any blacklisting practice, you run the risk of false positives so you need to be pretty careful with the domains you block and how broad you get with your wildcards. It has certainly kept my stats cleaner.

By: Andrew Krespanis

Andrew Krespanis — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t get much comment spam, but my referrer spam is incredible. As for most spam only having one referral — I wish! Most of mine range between 30 and 100 referrals. They just keep coming back for more.
One morning I woke up and found that 4 new spam sites had sent 180+ referrals between them.
What the F……… :\

By: gb

gb — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I tend to just do an IP deny for referal/comment spammers. They can change top-level domain names, quickly, but changing their IP is usually a bit of work. I’ve been getting a boatload of comment spam as of late, usually with the same person posting the exact same message about 10 times on a single entry.

These people make me homicidal…

By: Jim Rutherford

Jim Rutherford — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Referer spam is certainly a pain in the butt. A few weeks ago I got hit really hard and not only did the spammers plug up my log files, but they also stole close to 1GB of traffic! To combat these scum, I've resorted to simple additions to my .htaccess file.

By: Randy Peterman

Randy Peterman — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I write a statistics plugin for WordPress called StatTraq. SEO 'professionals' have tried to exploit a feature in StatTraq wherein people can open up the stats to any user by not requiring a login (so technically Search Engines could view the results). Referral spammers are all about getting their site linked to for PageRank etc. If you're a StatTraq user, please require logging in to help Slow Refferer Spam!

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jim:

Awesome! I just implemented your .htaccess thing. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on, but I agree with you that at least for now, no legitimate sites use .info or multiple dashes in their domains.

By: Scott Evans

Scott Evans — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a simple set of scripts to check referrers and email me when new ones show up. It includes support for filters, so you can get rid of obvious crap like texas.*holdem. In case anyone's interested: self-love Installing it isn't for the faint of heart, but there it is.