Comments on: example.com in my site statistics

Question: example.com in my site statistics

fletchmuy — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:03:23 -0800

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?

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:17:01 -0800

it's referrer spamming. they're hoping for click-throughs via your referrer logs.

By: fletchmuy

fletchmuy — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:22:38 -0800

Who would benefit from me clicking through to www.example.com? I don't see how anyone can profit from someone viewing that page.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:32:21 -0800

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.

By: fletchmuy

fletchmuy — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:33:59 -0800

That makes sense, brownpau, thanks.

By: Caviar

Caviar — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:47:26 -0800

It's probably just the default for whatever piece of code they co-opted to do the comment spamming.

By: revgeorge

revgeorge — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:00:13 -0800

example.com, example.net and example.org are reserved by RFC 2606. Nice to see blog spammers respecting standards, I guess.

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 12:26:34 -0800

oh, ok, sorry.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 13:26:01 -0800

Any tips on battling referer spam? Assume full access to Apache confguration. I have this crap all over my logs, too.