Comments on: Why am I getting hits from poker sites?

Question: Why am I getting hits from poker sites?

buriednexttoyou — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:26:30 -0800

In the "links from external pages" section of my blog's statistics, I'm getting hits from a lot of different poker websites. They don't seem to actually be linking to me, though. Is this some sort of strange spam thing? What is going on?

By: majick

majick — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:29:22 -0800

It's known as "referer spam".

By: adamrice

adamrice — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:31:45 -0800

Yes. It's referrer-log spamming. The scumbags are trying to take advantage of the fact that some people publish "linked-from" data on their blogs and the like, and build some google-juice this way.

Like cockroaches, there is no nook or cranny they won't try to wiggle into.

By: buriednexttoyou

buriednexttoyou — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:35:41 -0800

Ok, so how do I stop/filter them?

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:51:18 -0800

buriednexttoyou writes "Ok, so how do I stop/filter them?"

Well, either don't publish your referrer log, or filter it before you do publish it.

To filter it, just use grep -v:

grep -v "poker.com" your.referer.log.file | grep -v "anothercasino.com" > filtered.log.file

if your log file is "your.referer.log.file", after running this you have a new file called "filtered.log.file" that doesn't contain any line with "poker.com" or "anothercasino.com" in it.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:33:08 -0800

I used to put a lot of effort into finding referer spam, but ultimately I gave up. They've gotten very smart about spoofing user agents, using multiple IPs, hitting reasonable URLs, etc. The only recourse I see now is actually fetching the referring page and verifying it contains a link to your site. That's too much work. A collaborative solution would probably also do it, but again, too much work.

BTW, the #1 culprit in referal spam is a Windows app called Reffy. Bastard baked my blog's URL into his app that he sells to people, so I get a lot of this junk.

By: neuroshred

neuroshred — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 18:16:52 -0800

I stop them at the htaccess page. Requests that contain referer spam keywords or known referer spam sites get a 403 (access forbidden) error. It has been very effective, and there are only a few false positives. I'm willing to share my htaccess file. Just contact me.

By: geekyguy

geekyguy — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:21:04 -0800

After giving up a half a gig a day in bandwidth to this I switched my blog from b2Evolution to WordPress. I was spending entirely too much time adding to my filters. It has made a huge difference.

By: zymurgy

zymurgy — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 13:25:27 -0800

How do you make sure you referer log isn't published?

Most hosting packages come with AWSTATS, etc.

What do I need to do to make sure it's not visible?