Today I’ve stopped getting hit by named domains for referral spam. At first glance this sppears to be good news.

Instead, it appears that I’m being referral-spammed by an un-used IP address; perhaps in the hope that when it is associated with a DNS entry at some point in the future, my logging software will kindly run a Reverse DNS lookup, and thus the offending site will get it’s linkage.

This may also be related to rel=”nofollow”, in an attempt to find a loophole in the code which ignores specific domains. Or an attempt to avoid search engines blacklists.

It certainly seems a bit different, but all the other signs point to the same spambots as in all the existing spam. The referrer, for the record is http://12.163.72.13/.