Referrer spam revisited
March 1, 2004
Less than 3 weeks ago I wrote about referrer spam from fake blog sites. Today, as I peruse my access logs as part of my end-of-the-month ritual, I find myself again a victim of referrer spam.
I am getting hits from [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] (all redirected via JavaScript so that search engines ignore them). It doesn’t take a Photohunt expert to notice the similarities in each site. Amazing how this sites are appear to be purely legitimate - there is a dictionary site, a Bushido site and even an academic society’s anniversy meeting website . Most are just simply facades once you try to click around - links either lead back to the webroot or take you to some external site.
My conjecture: someone owns this collection of sites and is trying to get a high PageRank for the sites, either to later sell them off or for further abuse. Anyone else have a theory?
Anyhow, you can view my .htaccess to see my blacklist of referrer spamming sites as well as a mod_rewrite method of blocking referrers.
| Category: 
I have the same problem, so I’ve wrote a little PHP script to automatically deal with referrer spam. Take a look if you’re curious. Works fine for me, it’s running as cronjob once per day.
Posted by: Carlo Zottmann on March 2, 2004 5am