Help With Info In Log Files

Unknown External Links

[thatguy]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this if you have an idea what's going on.

Earlier this month I started to notice a large amount of unknown referrals from what looks like spam URLs. The is a partial list:

<snip>Usual list of hotels/poker referrer spam sites</snip>

I use AWSTATS and found the list under the title "Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)"

If anyone knows what's going on please let me know.

Thanks
Gary

[edited by: trillianjedi at 12:22 pm (utc) on April 26, 2006]
[edit reason] Let's not give them any further publicity ;) [/edit]

[cgrantski]

It's possible that they are all alias domains for the same site, and that there is a link on one of their pages to your site. Does your stats program only give you the referring domain, or will it also report on the referring page? Use that report to go to the page where there is supposed to be a link. You might just find out it's a legitimate source of traffic for your site.

They also could be participants in some kind of pay per click program you belong to, and they're just an affiliate displaying AdSense ads or something.

[trillianjedi]

Hi thatguy and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

This is commonly called referrer-spamming. Ensure that your stats/logfile data is not accessible publicly (password protect the page).

Even if your stats are not public, you'll still get it. Most spam works on the basis of "do enough and a few will get through".

Further info on referral spamming, and dealing with it, in this thread (see robho's post at msg #6 for a more detailed explanation of what it is):-

[webmasterworld.com...]

TJ

[thatguy]

Thanks for the comments, i'll dig a little deeper :)