example.com in my site statistics

January 18, 2005 9:03 AM

Why do I have so many referrer entries for www.example.com in the web stats for my site?

For about the past month, example.com has been the number one referrer to my site. My assumption is that a comment spammer has written a script to post to my comments form (I'm using WordPress, by the way) and is manually setting the referrer to cover his/her tracks. Is that what's going on here?

posted by fletchmuy to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

it's referrer spamming. they're hoping for click-throughs via your referrer logs.
posted by andrew cooke at 9:17 AM on January 18, 2005

Response by poster: Who would benefit from me clicking through to www.example.com? I don't see how anyone can profit from someone viewing that page.
posted by fletchmuy at 9:22 AM on January 18, 2005

It's a malicious bot, probably an email address harvester or a comment spam bot, spoofing its originating referrer. I get similar bots with "iaea.org" or even Google as their fake referrers.
posted by brownpau at 9:32 AM on January 18, 2005

Response by poster: That makes sense, brownpau, thanks.
posted by fletchmuy at 9:33 AM on January 18, 2005

It's probably just the default for whatever piece of code they co-opted to do the comment spamming.
posted by Caviar at 10:47 AM on January 18, 2005

example.com, example.net and example.org are reserved by RFC 2606. Nice to see blog spammers respecting standards, I guess.
posted by revgeorge at 11:00 AM on January 18, 2005

oh, ok, sorry.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:26 PM on January 18, 2005

Any tips on battling referer spam? Assume full access to Apache confguration. I have this crap all over my logs, too.
posted by xmutex at 1:26 PM on January 18, 2005