Is there such a thing as referrer log spam?

Is it possible to block fake referrals?

[jeffb]

Lately, I've been getting hammered with referrals from fake pages. Those that I've clicked on have either led to rather scummy products related to my field or been redirects that take me to a totally different site with someone's affiliate code attached.

I assume that the site owners who have been placing these fake referrals in my log have some sort of software that plants these in the logs of anyone whose site is related to their products as a way of getting visitors. One of the sites even had the nerve to request that I write them a testimonial describing how effective their traffic generating software had been at drawing me to their site!

Is there any way to block referrals from these sites? I'm getting so great a volume of them that they're severely compromising my ability to get any kind of meaningful data out of my referrer logs any more. Plus, the fact that these fake referrals are eating up my bandwidth.

[larryn]

Jeff,

If you search this forum, you'll find that some people have created extensive apache rules to block specific referrers from their site; for instance [webmasterworld.com...]

There are also analytic tools that will ignore the log spam so you get useful results.

Good Luck,

Larry