Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with referrer

URL WTF

mattdidthat — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:04:35 -0800

My site is getting a lot of weirdly-formed referring URLs--some with two or three URLs linked with commas--or URLs that do not appear to contain links to my site. What's going on? Here are two examples of URLs in my hit log--the first is one referrer that shows up in my log as three URLs (including mine) strung together:

http://www.lilidaviesnolink.co.uk/457/magic-betty-sing-along-6th-june, http://www.phonogramnolink.us/blogs2/dpdc/2009/05/trek_30.html, http://www.mattdidthatnolink.com/weblog

Another referring URL without a link to my site:

http://www.mp4dunyasinolink.com/index.php

(To make the URLs work, you'll need to remove the "nolink")

What's going on? What are these referrers, and why am I getting them? If this is spam, could someone please explain what they're doing and how I disable/remove it?

Thanks for the pageviews, no thanks for the spam.

tip120 — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:26:21 -0800

I have been getting weird Wordpress referrer spam the last 4 days, but there are no injections or anything of the like on my site. I have a site running wordpress. No comments or users, I'm using it as a simple CMS.

I'm using the StatPress plugin to check out who is coming to the site. This morning, I noticed an abnormally large number of visitors the last few days.

People seem to be visiting pages like mysite.com/?myfjkfosljfsfjd (NB : not a string I've seen, just an example). When clicked, it will go to my homepage. Checking the source, there is nothing out of the ordinary (no spam links, etc). If you google that end string by itself, you get one result, to my site, with a summary that lists a whole bunch of viagra type words.

Any idea what is going on, and how I can stop this?

I was running 2.8.2, upgraded to 2.8.3 this morning.

You can get my details from my userpage if you want specifics.

Redirects & Mediawiki.

Pronoiac — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:25:27 -0800

I have a private wiki, & I'd like to keep it from showing up in server logs. Specifically, I'd like to strip out the referrer information by having external links go through a redirect. How do I have Mediawiki munge external links to include the redirector? Also, would using a redirect really do what I want, or does this really vary by browser?

Block every shred of traffic from a referrer

JWright — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:45:42 -0800

How do I block absolutely all traffic from a specified referrer? I've got a handful of referrers I need to block completely - even pings. I want anything from the referrer ignored, and not to register as a single byte of traffic, if possible.

I've put PHP and .htaccess blocks in place, but they still seem to register a sliver of traffic on each hit.

Any way to block these completely? I have a dedicated server running Fedora, so I can install whatever I need wherever it needs to be.

Indirect Google Image hits?

bink — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 14:19:26 -0800

Why am I getting Google Image hits for an image that's not on my site? It's not the situation like in this AskMe, I don't think. I get hits from Google Image for images ON OTHER SITES that I've linked to on my weblog.

Here's one that's suddenly started generating lots of hits:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.swim2000.com/images/tyr/2005_suits/DMSN-610.jpg&imgrefurl=http://myblogname.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_myblogname_archive.html&h=550&w=467&sz=70&hl=en&start=73&tbnid=q9SZIwZH_-TIVM:&tbnh=133&tbnw=113&prev=/images%253

(I removed the name of my actual blog; I hope there's not actually one out there called "myblogname".) It's a picture of some bathing suits, and the link on my site just says "bathing suit".

This has happened once before with a different image. It hasn't resulted in an expensive amount of traffic yet, but I would like to know why it's happening and if I can avoid it in the future.

Blocking access based on referrer...?

poweredbybeard — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 12:16:44 -0800

Is it possible to restrict access to a web page (or whole site) based on the referrer? I noticed that a site I manage (which includes a phpbb forum) has been getting traffic off of the google search "inurl posting.php?mode=newtopic". I'm pretty sure this is one of the ways spammers and/or spambots are finding the forum.

Specific to my problem, is there any way to restrict access to visits coming from that search? Through scripting? .htaccess? etc?

And out of general interest, is there a way to block access based on referrers?

How do I block my url from showing up in other people's referral logs?

RoseovSharon — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:34:13 -0800

How do I block my url from showing up in other people's referral logs? I am not doing anything shady here... it's just that I've put up a blog that I mainly want to share with friends and family. I don't want to go to the trouble of password protecting it, and I know that anything on the web can be seen by most anybody... but I would like to simply discourge visits from those who have no reason to be there. I've already set up robot.txt(s) to keep the search engines out, but I want to deter people from visiting the site just because my link shows up on their logs due to an occasional link I might post. I know there is a way to block the referring link address (as frequently other sites get blocked in my own logs), I just don't know how to do it. Anyone have a simple solution?

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?

Why do people hide their http_referer?

dabitch — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:55:46 -0800

Why do people hide their http_referer? [+MI] afaik, privacy tools such as this NIS, will hide something as innocent as your http_referer (the last webpage you visited before landing on the next, ie; google, or metafilter that links to the new page you are visiting.) Apart from breaking old fashioned anti-leech tricks such as .htaccess rewrite, and even some very useful anti-bot functions in websites that might not want a thousand fake signups or comment spam, what advantage does hiding that information have to the users who do it? I'm just wondering why people feel like they need to hide the last page visited it since I have to code around it all the time and it's getting on my nerves.

Linkbacks

NekulturnY — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 10:22:00 -0800

Can anyone show me to a good place to check how many/which sites link to my site?

I tried using link:[mysite] on Google, but it doesn't seem very reliable. Some links of which I've known for months don't even appear, others that still exist disappear, etc.

Mysterious referrer log URLs

web-goddess — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 19:11:15 -0800

I'm getting a lot of weird URLs in my site's referrer logs that look like this: wysiwyg://5/http://www.mydomain.com/somepage.php. Anybody know what the heck's going on? [more inside] I've done some Googing and I turned up this page which describes that weird protocol a bit, but I still don't understand why I'm getting a hundred hits like this a day. They all point to the same page on my site but the requests are just for images, not the actual content. Here's an excerpt from the logs:

165.155.128.132 - - [03/Feb/2004:08:59:54 -0500] "GET /img/cornernav_r-tr.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 - "wysiwyg://5/http://www.mysite.com/somepage.php" "Mozilla/4.08 (Macintosh; I; PPC, Nav)"

They all seem to come from the same IP address blog, and they're all reporting Mozilla on Mac PPC. I do get a lot of school age visitors to this particular site, so maybe it's just some quirk of the old setup they're using. On the other hand, the little paranoid webmaster inside my head keeps wondering, "Has some no-good, nefarious person found a new way to direct link my images?"