Advertising with URL in logs

what will they think of next?

[innocbystr]

Found this in my logs this morning:

80.57.251.*** - - [15/Jan/2006:04:28:11 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 13532 "http://www.thislinkbecomesvaluableseehowitgot****anddothesame.be" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"

Good grief!

[dmorison]

Hi innocbystr,

This happens because there are log file analysis programs that generate reports in HTML and publish them into a sub-directory of your website. The "Top Referers" section of those reports often contains hyperlinks to those referers.

Thousands of these pages get indexed by the search engines because they are either not in password protected directories, or in some cases the webmaster provides an actual link to their stats on their website.

[innocbystr]

Thanks for the info dmorison. I use a log file analysis program where you have to download the logs off the server to analyze them. This is apparently a lot safer for fairly new people like me.