Tags: Spam
Curious Referrals
May 15th, 2005, by Rich.
An article on SpamHuntress.com got me thinking laterally about some of the referral stats I’m seeing, and I’ve started to notice something curious.
I’m seeing referrals from what appear to be valid blogs (i.e. I check my inbound connections to see if they’re spammers or not, and some of them are valid - if they were from spammers they’d be stripped from the stats) and yet, when I look within the page which is supposed to actually link here, there is no link. This is curious.
So, a hypothesis: these links could be down to a referral spammer who’s not happy that I’ve mentioned their lame antics in other posts.
I’m guessing the spammer could put a comment or trackback on someone elses blog and use a url from my site in doing so, but not put down an email address that’s mine, so I’d not be notified upon acceptance or rejection of the comment.
I’m further presuming the content of the message would then be moderated by the site owner, in some cases generating a clickthrough to my site, and the message subsequently removed since it would be apparent that it’s not from me.
So I’d see the referral, but not the deleted link.
This will, of course, be proved or disproved if others are seeing such a curious phenomenon, or can come up with an explanation; or if anyone who’s receiving such a message/trackback finds this post and confirms my suspicion.
May 15th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
Check out this one:
http://www.gpshewan.com/2005/05/15/two-stage-approach/
Might be related?
May 16th, 2005 at 9:16 am
I don’t think it’s spammy comments in your name. I’m seeing a tonne of referrals like this to my own site. I picked a couple up as soon as they came in yesterday and still didn’t see any comments in my name (although I did see general spam comments on a couple of blogs). I think it would be too much of a coincidence that every site I’m seeing being mysteriously referred is run by calm folk who just ignore it. I would think at least one would say ‘Why are you spamming me?’
Much more likely to be an idiotic spammer who’s has a fantasy that if they comments spam a load of sites - then referral spam those sites to others - that they’ll get a better SE ranking. It doesn’t work and it just ends up being a royal pain when trying to look at referral logs.
Another example of stupidity I think. But I’m keeping an eye on it.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:26 am
I have this happening too. I just don’t get it. It’s all from WordPress blogs though and started after I upgraded to 1.5.1. So I wonder if it isn’t a WordPress issue??