dstiles - 10:42 pm on Mar 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

For a long time now I have blocked any access which has a referer of ONLY http://www.google.com OR http://www.google.com/

Reason for this is that although a very few are (possibly) triggered by "lucky" search, almost all of them are fake, either from G or from a scraper.

I will continue to block these. Hopefully I will find no reason to block the https versions but don't bet on it!

The whole thing is a farce engendered, in my opinion, by a) technical incompetence; b) G trying to get more money for providing the full referer (just wait and see!); and c) reducing the load on their servers (which I'm sure was at the back of the "Your site is too slow" campaign.

Please, Bing, Anyone - get a bigger slice of the UK so we can forget about G!

[edited by: tedster at 3:25 am (utc) on Mar 22, 2012]
[edit reason] de-link the example URLs for clarity [/edit]