Log File Referral Anomolies

I recently started seeing some very strange entries in my SmarterStats account. Specifically, I am seeing referrals from sites that have nothing to do with my site. Not only that, when I review the supposed 'referring links' to see where these sites are linking to me, I can't find a link to my site anywhere.

I have attached screenshots of my Top Referrers and the Referring Links. My site is cheatsheetwarroom.com. I can't find a single link from any of the referring sites or links to my site.

I have reported the issue to DASP, and they have verified that my logs show referrals from these sites, but 1) I don't see why these sites would ever link to me 2) I can't find any links from those sites to my site (even following the referring links shown in SmarterStats) and 3) all of these weird sites started showing up at the same time.

Is there something I don't understand about referrals because this data does not look correct?

 

So are they sending traffic to my site? And if not (I don't believe they are) then how are they showing up in my logs? I'm a bit confused because I don't see links to my site.

Also, the bigger problem is that I can't really see who my top referrers are because of these bogus entries.

 

They are not sending traffic your way. It's called referral spam.

In a nutshell, they are trying to get you (and anyone else who sees your stats or logs) to go to their site by showing up in your referrer logs. Sometimes people's stats are publicly viewable, and that used to be what these idiots would target (because links to your site - even junk links - equals relevancy in search engine listings, etc., etc.). Now they just target everyone and everything. Like email spammers.

 

Yup, there is more and more spam lately.

 

wikipedia says: "As with e-mail spam, web site operators who receive unwanted referrer spam may respond using filtering and blocking. A simple attempt at rendering this form of spam ineffective is to prevent the search engine spiders from crawling the site logs by moving them to a non-public area such as a password-protected area, by using a robot exclusion file, or by appending the nofollow value to the links."

Since I'm a novice at blocking spam, which of these practices can I institute at DASP?

 

Any of them. But your logs aren't "crawlable," and neither are your site stats, so referrer spam is already ineffective.

The problem is, the spammers don't bother to determine whether what they're doing is effective, they just carpet bomb. It doesn't take any time to do the referral spam (it's all automated), so they don't care if 99% of their "efforts" are wasted. It's that 1% they are looking for.

You could block IPs (using IIS Manager if your account is on Windows 2008/IIS7), but that's an endless - and also ultimately ineffective - method, since most of the spam comes through proxies and the IPs change all the time.

 

That's a definite bummer.

 

While I sincerely believe that all spammers should be boiled in oil, publicly drawn and quartered and have their heads displayed on pikes surrounding the world's data centers, a small part of me has to admire their creativity and idiotic, dumb-robot tenacity in the face of utterly overwhelming opposition and hatred.

I look forward to the day when I can express that begrudging admiration to each of them personally, as they are being disemboweled on the White House lawn.



The preceding message is a personal opinion, and in no way reflects the official posture or corporate philosophy of Host Collective, Inc./DiscounatASP.NET, though really, it probably does.

 

My buffed arms are high in the air as I shout Ooh Rah!

 

don't hold back

Tell us how you REALLY feel, mjp

 

Man, I've been working in this industry for more than 15 years now, and I've probably wasted 10% of that time dealing with spam, spammers and various and sundry other fraudulent dink behavior, so I can't hold back where they're concerned!