Odd site referrals

[DXL]

So I'm looking throught the list of sites that are linking back to my site, and I've noticed something odd. There are a few referrals coming from poker, casino and gambling type sites.

I check out the URL and its often a simple page with links to casino or poker related sites. Why are these guys showing up in my list of referrers?

[Easy_Coder]

welcome to the club... they're spamming in hopes that you'll either go check out the site or if you log is out in the open then spiders will find it.

I pound em right back with my own crawler.

[John Carpenter]

I wonder why I never seen such referers in our logs. We get 2,000 unique visitors a day on average. Maybe you submitted your site to some dubious free directory or "traffic booster" services? They could serve as link collectors for these bots.

[DXL]

When you say you pound them back with your own crawler... what do you mean?

[Easy_Coder]

If they post 10 bs messages in my blog I bang 1000 page requests on their site and crank it up with each post.

[soquinn]

I’ve also seen these funny poker and casino referrals but can’t ever find an actual link to our site on their pages or even in the cache (if available). They seem to refer to different pages and it looks like different users are referred and not just a single bot or agent crawling? Make any sense?

[Easy_Coder]

soquinn, they do that by design. The whole strategy is to get you to see the referral link in your logs then 'click' to go see their site.

[Luddite]

I’ve also seen these funny poker and casino referrals but can’t ever find an actual link to our site on their pages or even in the cache (if available). They seem to refer to different pages and it looks like different users are referred and not just a single bot or agent crawling? Make any sense?

They'll be faking variables in the request header. Looks like unique traffic coming from links, but it's all crap.

IMHO it's just a time waster, forget about it.

[DXL]

If they post 10 bs messages in my blog I bang 1000 page requests on their site and crank it up with each post.

How exactly do you do that?

[soquinn]

Thanks for the info., our stats are protected so the strategy seems a bit pointless but it’s getting annoying because now it’s difficult to measure real traffic. Is there any way to stop or block them? These hits might even start affecting site performance for our real users?

[Easy_Coder]

How exactly do you do that?

load their site into my crawler and let it rip

[DXL]

Can I download a crawler program somewhere?

[4serendipity]

Thanks for the info., our stats are protected so the strategy seems a bit pointless but it’s getting annoying because now it’s difficult to measure real traffic. Is there any way to stop or block them? These hits might even start affecting site performance for our real users?

You could use mod_rewrite to block referrals from sites that are spamming your log. A Web search or two on "referer spam" should yield the info needed to accomplish this.