It’s my bandwidth, leave me alone
This month, referral log spam is absolutely out of control. And I’m the only one who sees those logs. Do they really think that by pinging my site 15,000 times that I’m going to click on their link to buy big dick pills (their words, not mine), fake Rolex watches or porn? Who is the marketing genius that figured out that if they hit a site thousands of times per day that they might get one hit out of the deal?
December 23rd, 2004 at 10:38 am
The infuriating thing about spam is that they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t yield money.
So here we have to assume that there are actually enough people running log-parsing statistics generation that yields their spammed sites as the top referers and that there are actually enough clicks to their website as a result.
Sounds crazy, I know, but the problem with this and other forms of spam is that there’s no cost associated with the spam, so they can cast 8 billion lines and it’s worth it if they get, you know, 10 bites.
December 23rd, 2004 at 1:45 pm
This is a very annoying problem, especially since it’s hard to stop — and you don’t want to stop it necessarily, since the usage patterns I’ve seen indicate that some of the referral spam comes from actual users whose systems are compromised by viruses or toolbars or some similar spamware.
If your referrer spam is limited to a few sites, this page describes how to configure Apache to block it.