Referral Logs Getting Spammed Big Time

[dvduval]

It is a really a pain for me on this one site. All the top referrers in Awstats are from this one site or from multiple redirect sites from this one site. They have a product called Reffy. I have already emailed them and told them to stop, and it seems to have only gotten worse. What can I do about this?

[Rosalind]

I'm getting this too, and the worst is that there's no predictable pattern to much of this spam. People with all manner of websites are spamming referral logs, as well as the usual porn and gambling suspects.

I have already emailed them and told them to stop, and it seems to have only gotten worse. What can I do about this?

Don't email them, it confirms that a human has read their message. Avoid visiting the offending page if possible, view it in Google's cache if you suspect it may be a legitimate link but avoid sending a hit, especially direct from your logs. It just encourages them. Ban the referrer with .htaccess, and the IP address. You might consider pro-actively banning similar keywords provided they are unrelated to your site, and perhaps whole IP blocks if you're certain you don't want any of the traffic from them.

[treeline]

These people (is that too generous a term?) really annoy me too. Seems like too much attention and effort directed even to writing a ban for them. Seems like a really bad business model.

[dvduval]

So if I look up the domain name for the "referral" and get the ip of that domain, would that work for blocking?