Logspam on the increase?

Is it just us....

[Stefan]

Is anyone else seeing a great increase in logspamming lately, especially from supposed blogs? I take it that they're desperate for backlinks and hoping to get it from bot-friendly stat pages. Rather pitiful, really. It's hard to have a great amount of sympathy, because they're wasting my time checking the referrals - and it would be nice if they would just p*ss-off and try writing some real content instead.

[larryhatch]

Agreed Stefan. The kind I hate is the one where you have to jump thru hoops registering just to see
what (if anything) was said about my site. In general, there is little harm done.
They don't consume much bandwidth, the biggest waste is their own time. -Larry

[Dijkgraaf]

I haven't noticed any blog referal spam myself, just the usual casino/poker ones and the occasional pharmecy one.

[AKat]

I've gotten a lot more spamming recently. It doesn't make sense to me since my logs aren't public at all. I can tell what most of the sites are about that are trying this, so I'm not about to go over and check them out.

I've had a major problem with people/sites trying to spam my bulletin board as well. I've made changes to my boards PERL code and can intercept just about all of that though.

[moltar]

I noticed an increase too. I think it's always increasing. Soon it will be 50% of our traffic :)

I use mod_security to get rid of log spam server wide. Simple rule to exclude the common keywords in referer is enough to cut back 80% of the spam.

[Dijkgraaf]

Akat, log spammers can't be bothered to check whether your logs are public or not, just like e-mail spammers they will just set a process running to spam everyone and even a few hits will give them results.

[GaryK]

I used to have a category in my browscap.ini file just for log spammers. So that people who use my file would know if a particular user agent had been confirmed as a spammer. It's gotten so bad in the last couple of months that I've stopped adding new entries to this category.

[robho]

One of my sites is now getting more log spam than real referrals. :-( The logs are not visible of course, so there is no point to it, but common sense has never been a spammer trait.

Yesterday for example one spammer hit it 650 times, another 575 times, etc. Only Google beat the spammers for referrals.

It does make the logs literally useless - as they'll often hit the same page a couple of dozen times in a row with different referrals (or the same one), making that page look misleadingly popular.

I came on here looking to see if anybody has any ideas how to work around this. Is there any co-operative venture, like a realtime blacklist, where I can download a log filter and upload new additions?

[gregbo]

I don't know of any logspam RBLs offhand, but I suppose you could start with the emailspam RBLs and augment them with whatever logspam IPs you're seeing. Perhaps you could get the emailspam RBL maintainers to extend their efforts to logspam as well.

[Stefan]

Since I started this thread, I've seen it increase even more. We've had a certain number coming in for about a year now, but this is getting ridiculous.

The "blog" ones seem to be some associated bunch of low-life, that have nothing to do with blogging and everything to do with pron. There's a great increase in the non-disguised pron sickos too. Along with those, there's crap like online shoe stores, (in reality, they're just non-content adsense sites), and you name it. It's really starting to clog up my log-files. We have three listings in the ODP, and I'm wondering if this is where they're finding us.

I know this is unlikely, but if any WW members are engaged in this desperate excuse for SEO, give it a break... it ain't gonna get you nowhere. Sorry the link-farms went tits-up, but if this is the best you've got, you don't deserve to have a site online.

[hanuman]

Same here. Log spam is on the increase. mostly from poker and adult sites. using regular expressions to block those referrals and hand them a sweet 403, seems to work. while offering the spammers 403's won't remove their visit from the logs over a couple of months they got tired and the spam load is decreasing. we are still monitoring the logs closely for new spam keywords......

[robho]

We have three listings in the ODP, and I'm wondering if this is where they're finding us

I'm not getting much of this on an ODP-listed site, the majority (several hundred times more) is on another site that isn't listed in the ODP and has few inbound links.

However, the site that gets the logspam does have good SERP results for a large number of fairly obscure keywords (each landing on a different page well inside the site), so to me it looks like the spammers are building their page list from the sort of software that generates scraper sites.

And the list seems to be similar across the numerous spammers (who are mostly from US dialup/cable networks) so maybe somebody is generating the page list then selling it with software as an "SEO tool". :-(