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New Spam Frontier: Referer Logs

Posted by timothy on from the die-spammers-die dept.

geoffsmith writes "Wired News is reporting that spammers are using referer logs as a cheap new way to spam small sites. Anyone running a website has probably already seen this phenomenon; I'm thinking of writing a script to remove these entries from my access_log by looking for hits that don't grab my images. (sorry lynx users!)"

2 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*sigh* by Dyolf+Knip · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The few stats I've come across regarding spam 'success' suggests that if they get more than a dozen responses (excluding the fools who actually send back "Take me off your list") per one million emails they're having a good day.

    [Wishful thinking mode ON!]
    This implies that there are, maybe, all of 10,000 suckers who keep every spammer on the planet in business. If we find them and cut them off, spam response would drop to about 1 per billion and there's just no way they could make any money off of that.

    --
    Dyolf Knip
  2. Backlinking by CaptainSuperBoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Backlinking, or posting your referral logs, is doomed to failure and rightly so. It's just a glorified way of making your site into a link farm, with the expectation that your fellow bloggers will do the same. It is serendipitous that this practice is open to 'abuse' although I would never call the abusers spammers. They are just utilizing a method for submitting data that the site owners themselves have provided. I don't see any reason to call this 'spam' since the site owners are inviting users to submit data through HTTP referral headers.

    Also, this quote from the article is ludicrous: "bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines."

    There is no search engine that bases your rank on the number of sites that you LINK to. I believe the bloggers actually mean that they're sorry to see their backlinks (read: link farms) go, since those do in fact raise search rankings. What a travesty- Sites may have to rely on the actual quality of their content, rather than trading links!

    Amidst the alarmist cries in the article, "spammers will destroy our practice of posting referral logs," nobody has even mentioned that there is a ridiculously easy technical solution. Before posting a referral link, why not just have your software visit the referring site and detemine if it actually links to your page? This will defeat the referral advertisers.