Odd referer stats (not work safe!)

[LeeRyder]

OK, I was going through my webstats and suddenly (as in , just began yesterday) I am getting hundreds of hits from gay websites for DesktopPC.us, as follows:

**links removed to prevent free advertising for them**

So whats going on here? I have no clue as I am (as you mostly know) Christian and very much against the "gay agenda". Theres nothing else in the stats to suggest where they are going on my site or what they are looking at. Also, I didnt find any odd files in my structures...so im stumped.

 

[Caveman]

Hi Lee,
Did you actually check the sites in question to see if there is a link there pointing to your site?

 

[LeeRyder]

ya cave.. nothing from what I can see. However, they all seem to be basically the same site (prolly all point to one ip or web addy).

I figured out where they are going to though.. my stats page... trip

 

[PolurNET]

Weird, maybe some guy trying to play around with your site... stay on alert mode

 

[Mark]

Google Search for Your name "Lee Ryder" is Famous for something else Lee ~

Porn Star: Lee Ryder. Purchase Video or DVD HERE. Lee Ryder DVD and Videos. Female Porn Stars. Adriana Sage Alex Taylor Alexa Rae ...
mrac.cc/porn-star-Lee-Ryder.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

 

[LeeRyder]

fair enough.. but of all the sites ove had..this has never happened before like this. and besides.. they are pointing to my stats page (not webstats..but the built in e107 stats page).

friggin odd i think lol

 

[aww]

This is called referer spam (I think).
It is getting more and more common.

It is very easy to send a fixed referer to a site when browsing or when they are combing for email addresses. What they hope is you have some kind of public referer page - alot of blogs do and some other sites. Helps them pick up PageRank.

I have seen it in my logs for almost a year now.

 

[superprogrammer]

Google Search for Your name "Lee Ryder" is Famous for something else Lee ~

Porn Star: Lee Ryder. Purchase Video or DVD HERE. Lee Ryder DVD and Videos. Female Porn Stars. Adriana Sage Alex Taylor Alexa Rae ...
mrac.cc/porn-star-Lee-Ryder.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

LOL

 

[LeeRyder]

thats a trip aww. so they are intentionally sending these people to my site in hopes I increase their pagerank? lol

thats odd though, why wouldnt they link to like..cnn.com or something smarter than my pagerank zero site? lol

 

[AdsenseGuy]

aww is right, refferer spam, they just want you to visit their site from your logs

 

[HFear]

Referrer spam sounds like a good technique for getting visitors, how does it improve pagerank though ?

 

[LeeRyder]

hmm adsense guy.. does that sound right? I get roughly 300 visits from each of their 100 or so websites and they do this to get me to click over to one of their sites to check what it is? Sounds like an aweful lot of work and is going on it's third day now...

 

[HFear]

It's not really an awful lot of work, they can just leave their bots running. There are certain programs that can bring fake hits to websites that let you enter in the URL for the referrer.

 

[McDope]

It doesn't cost them anything to spam your logs. One can create a simple PHP script that uses cURL (for instance) and that visits your site on a regular basis, faking the referer info. Fairly easy to write, it usually does its job. We all get curious to see who is checking our site and our first reaction would be to visit their site and see why and how they are accessing our site. In my opinion, it's not so much for PR reasons (not many people have public stats pages crawlable by Google) as for making the webmaster check their site.

 

[Caveman]

This seems pretty weird to me.

 

[HFear]

LeeRyder, do you mind removing the links from your original post in this thread ? I accidentally clicked one while I was scrolling down!

 

[McDope]

This seems pretty weird to me.

Heh, it is not

aww is right, it's getting more and more common. Think of it, it's a really cheap way of spreading your site and hard to regulate. After all, they fake the user agent as well, so it's hard to prove that it was not a human who visited your site.

 

[LeeRyder]

ya hell sorry. I meant to do that as soon as it became apparent as to what they were doing. :S

 

[Caveman]

Heh, it is not

aww is right, it's getting more and more common. Think of it, it's a really cheap way of spreading your site and hard to regulate. After all, they fake the user agent as well, so it's hard to prove that it was not a human who visited your site.

What good would this tactic do? If I'm not looking to be a perv, as soon as I click on the referer link and find out it's a porn site, I'm gone. They gain nothing and only waste bandwith. It just doesn't make sense to me I guess.

 

[McDope]

Well, this kind of stuff is not related to pr0n sites only. In my experience, I got spammed a bunch of times and the referer never lead me to a pr0n site. In most ocassions they were 'get rich soon' type sites and nearly everybody wish to get rich soon, don't we In any case, it's the same situation as in normal mail spamming. You send a gazillion email messages in the hope that a tiny percent will get back to you.

Also, as someone above wisely points out, it can be a side effect. Think of a mail harvesting bot that visits your site to collect email adresses for spamming purposes. At the same time it can spam your server logs or your guestbook if it finds one. The possibilities are endless. It does not need to be wasted bandwith IMHO.

By the way, I'm certainly not related to the spamming 'industry' but I saw this topic being discussed in other forums and as I said above I ate the bait as well a couple of times.

Cheers!