Spam referrers?

Many (hundreds) of visits from strange referrers

[ferdinand]

This may be a quick one to answer (I hope).

My site is quite new (2 months) and low traffic (may hit 10000 page views in May).

Yesterday I had more than 900 visits from a referrer which traces back to a site selling pharamceuticals.

I am also getting Texas hold'em type referrers regularly.

Could someone explain why they are doing this, and what action I need to take?

My PR is 4.

Thanks in advance.

Rgds

Ferdinand

[jonrichd]

Chances are that you've become a victim of log spam. Because some sites have their log files (or stats program results) visible to the search engine, referers to your site might get recognized as links from your site, should a spider visit your logs/stats program.

Other sites will sometimes show their most recent referers on their pages (particularly blogs).

No one is visiting your site, except a bot that leaves the desired referer address. You could try blocking the IP address, particularly if the bot is eating a lot of bandwidth.

[ferdinand]

Thanks.

I have a link to the top level of my Webaliser stats, but the actual logfiles are not readable.

Perhaps I should remove that link.

I don't think that I have access to the raw logfiles myself - this one is on a very basic hosting setup as a trial.

Ferdinand

[ferdinand]

I'll take down the "server stats" link, and see what happens.

Thanks

Ferdinand