Denying certain URL's from accessing my site

[eljefe3]

It seems that a lot of 2nd tier PPC engines are paying scripting kiddies and what not a commission for acesssing my homepage. From looking at my logs I know these are just bots visiting as these scripts don't call any image files off of the homepage, nor do they ever go to another page.

The first tier PPC that recruits these 2nd tier PPC sites actually makes me a decent amount of $$, so delisting off the 1st tier PPC isn't a realistic solution.

Is there some kind of htaccess protocol where you can deny visitors from www.a-second-tier-ppc.com?

[jdMorgan]

You'll have to watch the semantics here...

You can easily block the second tier PPCs' IP addresses themselves, but that's not going to help, because each 'script kiddie' is going to use his/her own IP address. So, you might be wanting to block referrals from these second-tier PPC engines.

However, HTTP_REFERER is not very reliable, as some browsers (or scripts) won't provide a referrer, and if provided, the referrer can be blocked by Norton Interner Security, and by caching proxies between the browser and your server.

'Not fetching an image' is often not enough to base a block on, either. The problem is that many ISPs (such as AOL) use caching proxies. These proxies will cache your images if any one of their customers views your site, and provide those cached images directly to other customers on request, rather than fetching them again from your server. You must take care to set up your cache-control headers on those images you want to use as sentinels for 'suspicious accesses.'

With all that in mind, you might want to review your raw log files, and see what info you might base a blocking method on.

Jim