Dangerous Traffic on a website

Questions on receiving traffic from a site dealing in unsuitable content.

[shakaal]

In our log report we saw traffic being referred to our website from a domain name hosting adult content. In fact this url featured as the top domains referring traffic to us. How does this harm us with respect to Google? Of course we want to stop it. Could someone please explain this.

thank you

[PatrickDeese]

They might be trying to spam your "referrer logs". Make sure that your referrers are not publically accessible, or at least make sure that you exclude it in your robots.txt file.

Once the value of the link evaporates, most likely your referrals will as well.

[shakaal]

Hi Patrick
Thank you for your reply. This may sound kind of stupid. I am not sure what referrer logs are. Could you please explain?
thanks

[dirkz]

Could you please explain?

Some webmasters allow the public to look into their logfile reports generated by tools like webalizer. Most tools assemble a list of referrers there and how many hits they generated. If these analysis pages have PR, it could be clearly a target for spammers who want to have their pages listed there.

Once the value of the link evaporates, most likely your referrals will as well.

From my experience the spammers don't really care, I believe some think that they just have to get your attention to get a customer :) It's really strange what some spammers think. Maybe it's just despair.

I surely have no publicly available logfile reports, but I get spammed all the time from really weird domains.

[rogerd]

Shakaal, sometimes your site's traffic logs are published as HTML pages that you can view. If another site can get his domain listed as a top referrer, then that site gets a free link in your log pages.

If your traffic reports are exposed to the world, password-protect them.

(Dirkz typed faster... :))

[PatrickDeese]

shakaall said: "In our log report we saw traffic being referred to our website"

log report = referral logs

if any old person can get to them via the web, or especially if they are linked to from the pages and can be browsed (like extreme tracking).

Some of the typical tracking service (wusage for example) use the same folder names.

Anything like this can get your referrers crawled.

[shakaal]

As far as I know, our logs are not publicly available. We use Apache. In fact our logs are not on the webserver. Our webmaster keeps them on the intranet server. We usually get the logs from there to get our reports.

Is there any other thing that I am missing here?

[WebGuerrilla]

Here is a good past thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

It sounds like someone is just doing a large scale spam crawl and your site was included. You don't have anything to worry about. Even if your logs were open on the web. I've never seen a case where a site was penalized because an adult site showed up on their stats page.

[dirkz]

log report = referral logs

Sorry for my lengthy post, I overlooked that there is already the notion of a log report :)

Is there any other thing that I am missing here?

As I said, most log file spammers don't even care whether it's available to the public. They're using automation I would guess. Hey, I've even seen Guestbook spamming on GBs where you couldn't leave a URL :)

[shakaal]

Thaks WebG
I read that report..it makes sense now...the only difference in our case is that we do not have public stats..so how did it manage to get into our report as the top referring domain...Also our own PR was dropped by Google from 5 to 4. We have now redesigned the website hoping to pick up that rank. We believe that the drop was due to the fact that this website is a sister website to our mainwebsite and was created out of it. We thought we were penalized for putting in somewhat same kind of content. Our main website enjoys a PR of 7. We have now changed this sibling website, and have just put it up last week. Infact few of the pages are still under construction.....
and then this month's log report had this weird surprise for us.

[Yidaki]

>so how did it manage to get into our report as the top referring domain.

EVERY request to your page gets logged. They just ran a bot over your site with the spoofed referer and that's it. Nothing to worry about - they simply don't check if a site's log is open to the public or not. You're one of millions of victims. :)