Comments on: Adult Referrer Sites

Question: Adult Referrer Sites

thebwit — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:14:00 -0800

For some reason lately the traffic to my site has increased by a lot (about 500+ visitors a day) which nice and all. I have a great script that reads the log files and figures out the stats and I wrote a custom script to track referalls. One thing I noticed though is a large portion of the traffic I receive comes from adult sites that do not link to me. So how is it that on any given day pornwizzard.com can send me 30-40 visitors? Do I really have that many people who read my site after going to pornwizzard (or any other number of adult sites) or are these sites doing something funky trying to just get traffic to their site if I was to randomly put up a last 10 referrals?

By: fvw

fvw — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:19:57 -0800

You guessed it. Referer spam is becoming more common these days. It works for the people responsible in two ways: Firstly, people that read the statistiscs (and there could be quite a few of these on sites that publish these) go to the site advertised out of curiosity. Secondly, if you publish your referer stats, google and the likes will see this as you linking to them, thereby increasing their pagerank (or equivalent metric on other search engines).

By: kindall

kindall — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:37:27 -0800

This is not new. Several MeFites, including yours truly, are quoted in that story.

I switched my stats script over to record a hit only when a particular graphic on the page is loaded. This has eliminated basically all my referrer spam.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:57:32 -0800

Probably a good idea to use robots.txt to remove your referrer log page from the indexes. Don't let those spammers get an edge.

By: Voivod

Voivod — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 12:14:54 -0800

Please don't assist them in their scam by actually naming them in posts on places like Metafilter. You're practically doing their job for them.

By: thebwit

thebwit — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 21:44:44 -0800

Thanks for all the answers. I do not have a "referall" page that is public or accessable by google so it does no good. And since I didn't actually link them in the post I doubt it will help them on google at all as far as page rank is concerned. Once again thanks for the answers as it was bugging me.