01/07 2005 – The referral spammers have been on to this site in a storm today, even though I keep adding them to the list of sites that get nothing but a null space in replay when tracked as the referring site.
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Update 2005-01-08: If you want to find a few hundred of the sites doing this strange kind of referral spam, do a Google search for miss-proper use of the hosting account. That displays over 200 sites that you most likely will find in the referral field of your logs. I did anyway.
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Today about seven sites from the same IP range (in a netblock owned by Covad Communications) have been among the most active. The strangest thing about them is that they all show variations of the same ”terminated account” error page on the actual sites. Of course the accounts can be terminated, but to me it looks more as if these sites are building up links before they are actually launched. The main reason for this theory being that all these alleged ”termination pages” have slightly different wording.
I think that the referral spammer who owns these sites have planned to
Of course, this is purely speculation from my side, but I’m trying hard to figure out reasons for doing referral spamming. Pop-ups and pr0n marketing (as described in this Wired article) just doesn’t seem to be reason enough.
I’m also trying hard to find ways to fight back referral spammers. Shuting them out from my site (as described here) isn’t enough. I would love to send them something that would just stop these spambots cold without waisting my own bandwidth. A huge block of text or links to nothing but other referral spammers maybe… But it doesn’t feel like enough. I want to scare them off somehow.
Got any ideas? Contact me. The address is at the bottom of the page.