A REAL B$#@$%^#%&

Viral Marketing

[carfac]

Got hit last night by a viral marketer. As you know, these are the B#*&^%&^*&'s that hit your website, and their UA is the page they want YOU to view! I KNOW there is a ban on not putting up URL's... and I STRONGLY suggest you do not follow this URL (it is ONLY their marketing!)... but I think when the UA is a URL, that is OK, right? (If not, please edit!)

They ONLY hit robbots.txt (which is nice) but they hit it a coiuple hundred times. I would STRONGLY suggest a ban on the IP and the UA, for those that care!

216.169.111.198 - - [11/Feb/2003:19:11:09 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 5169 "http://www.tvsites.net/pop-up-terminator.html" "http://www.tvsites.net/pop-up-terminator.html"

In fact, I think I will make a ban on all UA's that begin "http://"- any real reason not to?

dave

[fiestagirl]

I'm sick and tired of this kind of trash traffic too. I'm beginning to have another clue about this tactic also. Imagine this:

You are using a tracking service.
Your log file analysis gets indexed on GG.
They have hit thousands of other sites whose logs get indexed.

Voila, instant links! The latest and greatest in PR manipulation.

[carfac]

THAT, fiestagirl, is precicly why I cran to webmasterworld to post this as soon as I saw it! I am with ya!

Ban that IP NOW!

dave

[toolman]

This is AKA "log spamming"

[carfac]

toolman:

Is it also Viral Marketing... or am I using that term wrong?

(And if I am... what is Viral Marketing?)

Thanks!

dave

[korkus2000]

I have started getting a lot of log spamming recently. Must be making a come back.

[Nick_W]

I think the term is used wrongly ;)

Viral marketing is usually used to describe stuff like 'email this page' and free downloads and stuff. Where one hit generates several others.

Log Spamming is what you're describing. It's a little petty but, enough people do it to make me wonder if there's anything in it....

Nick

[chiyo]

Good point that it means their URL has a small chance of being listed on a log report out in the open to spiders. Maybe thats why they do it.

I would advise strongly against leaving your logs in the open, apart from the normal "your competitor will get your referrers thing". In our logs we get referrers from some very suspect places including porn sites. I think its something to do with opening a second window while browsing another site. These would all count as "links to bad neighbourhoods" from your site. I suggest you remove them from spiders view asap.

[pshea]

The technique also goes by the name, I believe, of "neural marketing" and was discussed that way here [webmasterworld.com]

[kevinpate]

Morphing just a bit here, because that's what my .htaccess file is doing as well for unknown reasons.

I just added the 216.169.111.198 from this thread and some other deny froms it was time to add as well from another thread.

Now though, every visitor to the site is kicing up an error message in the error log, to this effect

[Sun Feb 16 17:10:25 2003] [alert]
[client <IP #"s Edited as it's not an IP listed in .htaccess>] /home/folder/main_html/.htaccess: invalid mask in network/netmask

Anyone tell me how adding a couple of
"deny from" lines and saving the file would cause such a message to be repreatedly showing in the error log right now? As important, any clue how i can fix this?

[jdMorgan]

kevinpate,

I suspect you have used an incorrect-format IP address in your deny statement(s). If this is not true, you might want to post your "new" lines and the surrounding logic as a new thread, and let's have a look at it. Just change the first two numbers in the IP addresses to 192.168 if privacy is a concern.

Jim

[kevinpate]

Bingo! You're a prince, a gentleman and a scholar (and if by chance none of those fit ya, you're a great help all the same!)

As for Me, it's time I enroll in keyboarding 101 and get my eyes checked anew. Looked right past the prob the first two times.

Many thanks.