Thursday, June 10. 2004
Referrers List is Gone - Please Comment
You may notice that the Top Referrers list is gone from my sidebar. I got hit with "Referrer Spam" this week. I've noticed for weeks my hit counts going up with adult sites as referrers, but at first wasn't sure why. They found my blog this week, and now I know why.
The adult sites are trying to increase their "page rank" by having more sites link to them. So they have robots that find weblogs that have automated referrers lists, and then increase the hit count but hitting the page over and over again. Before I turned it off, one incest-taboo.org page had 107 referrer hits in my list.
The dev team is debating how to handle this. I deal with SPAM all day, and at this point I think the only effective way to deal with this is to have the blogger approve referrers. There's some resistance to this on the Dev team. Please comment here...do you agree with me? Or do you think some kind of automated tool would work, and be preferable?
JaBbA says let me hear you...
Update...
I've deleted the porn spammers and put in some blocks to keep them out, so I've reactived my referrers list. However, we're still looking for a real solution - this is only temporary.
The adult sites are trying to increase their "page rank" by having more sites link to them. So they have robots that find weblogs that have automated referrers lists, and then increase the hit count but hitting the page over and over again. Before I turned it off, one incest-taboo.org page had 107 referrer hits in my list.
The dev team is debating how to handle this. I deal with SPAM all day, and at this point I think the only effective way to deal with this is to have the blogger approve referrers. There's some resistance to this on the Dev team. Please comment here...do you agree with me? Or do you think some kind of automated tool would work, and be preferable?
JaBbA says let me hear you...Update...
I've deleted the porn spammers and put in some blocks to keep them out, so I've reactived my referrers list. However, we're still looking for a real solution - this is only temporary.
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They got me, too. Crap! The approval thing is hard, because you could fudge the stats. Is there any way to create a filter?
Whitelisting is a promising solution. As you mentioned (in the mail list), automation will not work.
Louise, the "fudging stats" is a valid concern. But, S9Y can choose not to allow fudging. What fudging are you referring to? the URLs themselves or the hit count?
I've had to remove the Referrers list off my blog, as it looks like the porn site asshats have found another way to up their page count. More info on my bro
Tracked: Jun 10, 11:02