My website has been getting serious referer spam for over a month now. My referer stats page is becoming useless...probably about 2/3rds of the entries are bogus spam sites now. I don't publish the stats on the web, so there's no one to aggravate but me, but still it bugs me that they're wasting my bandwidth. Apparently their software targets blogs and tries to leave comment spam, but in my experience it branches out and starts to referer spam all the other pages on the site.
The referers are hard to block because they keep changing domain names and the IP addresses come from all over the place, presumably open proxies and/or zombie computers.
Ann Elisabeth has spent time researching the referer spammer and has lots of details on
her blog. Others are posting about it too. (
1) (
2)
Apparently this current barrage of junk referers is the work of one person or group. I'm ready for someone to shut them down!
I thought I'd give back by putting up the legitimate referrers in my log, those linking to the blog. Some may be from me posting comments, while others are links in blog entries. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/01/16/RefererBS Got an amazing amounts of hits...
Tracked: Jan 18, 04:15