Referral Spam
I had posted on this topic quite some time back. Here is the original article.
It seems to be the bane of site owners everywhere. Your server logs contain some vague links to poker, drugs, yadda yadda yadda… exactly like normal e-mail spam. You don’t even know where they came from. The problem is that it’s being written by some spam bot which doesn’t care whether it views the page or not.
At first sight, it seems to be pointless - the only person who’s going to see the links is you - the site owner. Nobody else is going to see them, and eventually click on them. Unfortunately for us, there are a number of sites out there which publish the referrers. What good does it do to the spammers? The answer can be summed up in just one word - PageRank. The sites which publish their referral logs are likely very popular and enjoy a very high PageRank on Google and other search engines. If just a few of these spam links are displayed, Google will assume these links to be good and boost their PageRank.
Unlike such websites, my access logs are private. Only I get to see them. So what’s the point of spamming me and others with private access logs? The problem is that these spam bots don’t know and don’t even care whether the site publishes their access logs or not. The biggest advantage right now is that there is no law against accessing a website. So these bots could give a GET request all day long without breaking a single rule. This results in a major problem for all site owners.
First of all, it is one hell of a pain in the ass. What is the purpose of a referral log if all you get to see are links to Viagra and poker? The second major problem is the bandwidth consumption. These bots don’t care about what data they receive, but it hits us where it hurts most - our bandwidth consumption.
The problem with implementing a table based blacklist is that it can slow down normal page loads. We need something that doesn’t affect normal users - but can still give the spammers one big kick in the rearside.
Previously, Sat had commented that he’d never received such spam. The point is that you never get to see your access logs on BlogSpot blogs. Nor are they accessible by anybody on the outside (of Google that is). Nor is your bandwidth metered. So there is no issue for BlogSpot owners, unless they are using some third party tool to monitor referrers and the tool doesn’t implement a blacklist.
May 9th, 2005 at 8:49 am
Hi Nirenjan,
I also keep getting such spam hits, but never really thought of posting about it. I clicked on one such spam link and some vague software / spyware got installed in my machine. I think the Blogosphere has to address this issue collectively.