Casino sites on referer

[mlduclos]

Hello

When I check my webstats I notice many international visitors from various countries which visit the site by a casino or poker referer. In these casino sites, theres no link for my webpages, and my site dont have nothing to do with casino or online games, and about 90% of my usual visits become from same country. Theres a large number of sites and domains related to casino and poker.

The problem begun since a month ago. Any idea about what is happen?

[Dijkgraaf]

It is called Log Spam. They are basically running a bot that is making request of your web site with the refer set to their site. They do this because some peoples logs or summaries there off are visible to all, including search engines, who then find them.

Very little you can do about it.

[mlduclos]

That's sad. Spam is sad at all, but this is ridiculous. About one visit each 10 minutes. Put the webstats private or password protect would help?

[larryn]

Mlduclos,

You should always keep you stats in a protected location, but that won't stop the spammers from hitting your server. Some people try to maintain lists in the server configuration to thwart the requests, but that just adds more work for the server and the maintainer (you can find discussions about this here on WebmasterWorld in this same forum).

Personally, I just let the log analysis tools filter out those requests so that they don't screw up the stats from 'real' users. For some of my clients with really popular sites, the casino's don't even make a dent in the over stats.

Good luck,

Larry

[Aircut]

1. make sure your stats are not public
2. add the following to your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On

than followed by a
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*badword* [NC,OR]

line for each bad keyword in the refferal you want to block....like

poker
viagra
casino

etc

close the script by

RewriteRule ^.* - [F]

you will still see them in the access log, but they will move to the 403 categories :-)

[kahuna]

I started banning through their ip addresses... usually country specific. Since my/our webistes pertain to United States origin.. it's not too difficult. But if you are a Euro than it may not be so easy to get around. Almost all our log spammers are Euro..

Good luck

[topsites]

That ref-spamming is sad, it is beyond that, lol, I feel your pain.

First, ensure the header for the stats includes the standard <meta noindex / nofollow> tag so that engines do not penalize you for linking to bad neighborhoods. Furthermore, I don't think site statistics belong in an engine's database, thou I could be wrong, I just don't see visitors actively searching for Web site statistics...?

On my statistics program, I was able to turn off the Origin / Referrer section while the rest of the stats continue to be publically viewable, this bit was switchable in the .conf file (awstats in my case). Perhaps yours provides similar option?

If neither of these options work for you, then turn it off, you're better off removing this bit of low-interest content BEFORE the spammers get even ONE hit. By the way, from now on, when you recognize a spam site, don't bother visiting them to see if they linked to you, that's 1 more hit that further encourages their vile activity. Not to make you feel bad, we all click a few times until we figure it out, but I don't give them nothing nowadays.

Far as what I think of ref-spammers, I think they're f-word'n mo-foworden pieces of s-word LOL

Hope is help.

[larryn]

First, ensure the header for the stats includes the standard <meta noindex / nofollow> tag so that engines do not penalize you for linking to bad neighborhoods. Furthermore, I don't think site statistics belong in an engine's database, thou I could be wrong, I just don't see visitors actively searching for Web site statistics...?

Topsites,

While its important not to publish your stats (although even if you don't the log spammers still appear to target you anyway), the best way is to password protect the stats directory or use a different method (FTP, alternative machine name) to access the stats.

If you can't do that, then its better to use a robots.txt exclusion file to avoid the spiders even peeking at your stats folder. Putting the tags in the page header still requires the spiders to download the pages, which partially defeats the purpose of the exclusion if they have to open the page to discover they shouldn't. Also, modifying each file in the stats report to add that header could be a major task, having to be practiced on each pass of the stats generation - the robots.txt file is 'forever'.

Larry

[mlduclos]

Hello

Thanks for the answers. I put a line on robots.txt to exclude the stats dir. I search google and google had indexed this this because there was a forum message reference to the URL. Maybe spammers search for commom words of popular stats program to chose the targets.

It's a interesting suggestion the change in htaccess which forbids access for visits with certain keywords in referers. However I cant make this work. I addedd the following lines to the .htaccess and all domain becomes forbidden to all visitors. Something is wrong with the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*casino* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*poker* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*backgammon* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*backgamon* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*backgemmon* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*backgemon* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*texas-holdem* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*texas-hold* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.*rainbowfactory.net* [NC,OR]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F]}

I found another way googling, they suggest:

SetEnvIfNoCase Via evil-spam-proxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-domain.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-keyword spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer doobu.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer