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.