Recognize this Amazon url linking to you?

Weird referrals coming from Amazon

[cfx211]

So it looks like I am getting traffic from the following URL:

http*//www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0789484250/edgate-20

But I am not on this page. I don't sell any products, and am not sure how Amazon could be sending anything to me. The only thing I can think of is some sort of user recommendation linking to me, but the product it pulls up has nothing to do with me.

I went through the last 5 days of raw logs and did not see any traffic from Amazon and am not sure why I missed this on the old analog referrer report until tonight.

Has anyone come across this before?

[edited by: engine at 4:09 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2003]
[edit reason] de-linked [/edit]

[Dreamquick]

Two possibilities;

1) Browser gets confused and passes a referrer when it shouldn't
2) Someone wants to spam their affliate link around to make it rank better

On the off-chance it's #2 then you might want to edit your post in order to stop the link being click-able (normally remove the http:// prefix).

- Tony

[cfx211]

I had about 20 referrals from this URL, so it is probably not a case of the browser goofing. Spam does seem likely, but I have never seen someone send over that many requests. Then again maybe we have started ignoring the odd request or two with weird referring URLs and now spammers have to really up their requests to get noticed.

I would sure hate to see referring url spam take on the volume it does with email. Luckily the number of log readers is a lot smaller than the number of people with email.

[Dreamquick]

Generally I see them in small clusters (2-3) which re-appear every so often (days or weeks apart) - never seen 20 at a time though!

I'm playing with a little log analysis code at the moment and you can spot these fake referrers a mile off - they are either really low numbers or really high...

- Tony

[EliteWeb]

This is what is happening. Listen good, dont goto the URL. That is an affiliate URL, when you goto it it puts a cookie on your computer telling amazon who sent you to credit them money when you purchase. The 'edgate-20' is the affiliate ID.

This is showing in your logs because its spam, like the sites that spam you with porn crap in hopes you click on it. They are sending falsified requests while spidering the internet sending the URL to webmasters logs worldwide.

[cfx211]

Tony- I am not sure that it was 20 at a time or if this person finally got me enough to show up as one of the listed referring urls in my analog report and the 20 have been over the span of a few months. I have not found him in my raw logs yet and probably won't bother downloading and opening the last 90 days worth to do so.

One way or the other it was spam and I am going to complain to Amazon about it.

The unfortunate thing is that most webmasters are very traffic greedy and image conscious. The combination of these two mean we will follow new/weird referrers back to the source to see how we are being presented on that site. This means that our "click through" rate might encourage the practice, however I hope that no one will ever buy anything from something like this so it does not become another mainstream tool in the spam arsenal.

[cfx211]

Just wanted to close this out by saying one week later that I have never recieved a reponse or acknowledgment from Amazon on this issue.