MFA perfect storm? YouTube, BlogSpot, AdSense

Finding referrer log spam to blogs with only YouTube videos and AdSense ads

[KenB]

This morning one of my sites was hit a short surge in bogus requests for a single webpage from a single Malaysian IP address with each request having a different Blogger blog as the referring page. When I checked some of the blogs out they each had one simple characteristic they only contained some YouTube videos posted by others and AdSense ads.

It makes one wonder if Google hasn't created a MFA (made for AdSense) perfect storm by allowing spammers to combine free YouTube videos with free and easy to generate Blogger blogs and revenue generation via AdSense. The only thing spammers need to add to the mix is a bot that can spam server logs with the MFA blogs URLs in the referrer field.

Let's hope Google takes action to put an end to this new form of MFA sites.

[jetteroheller]

I posted in an ohter webmasterworld forum about it

[webmasterworld.com...]

It's really annoying.

Only one year ago, visiting links in my referer log was a very interesting task, many disussions about my page.

Now I find nearly only this wrong referer log entries.

[jomaxx]

jetteroheller, 75% of non-SE refferers are log spam? Don't you have any organic traffic? I see a bit of this, but not much.

Maybe your log information is somehow visible online, and the bad guys have figured out that spamming your log works.

[KenB]

I would have to agree that 75% of all referrer URLs are spam. Yes the quantity of spam referrers is growing, but it is still a minority of my overall referrers.

What caught my eye this time was how the spammers are combining Google's free services to make their spam sites and using AdSense to monitorize their spam.

[jetteroheller]

jetteroheller, 75% of non-SE refferers are log spam? Don't you have any organic traffic? I see a bit of this, but not much.

I did not check all my logs, only the entries from a new folder just created to watch how it starts in search engines.

It seems the referer log spaming software uses rss news feeds, so special new content found in rss news feeds is heavy spamed.

[KenB]

The event that caught my attention was 12 requests for the exact same web page on my site from the same IP address in less than one second. While the page in question is in my sitemap, it has been on my website for a couple of years and had absolutely nothing to do with the subjects of the spam blogs being promoted.

My suspicion is that this referrer spam is not about catching the attention of webmasters, but instead is an effort to create back links via search engine bot accessible server log reports for SEO purposes.

[jetteroheller]

My suspicion is that this referrer spam is not about catching the attention of webmasters, but instead is an effort to create back links via search engine bot accessible server log reports for SEO purposes.

That was the first wave.

I have a site with referer log stats.

I stoped updating this site 2 years ago, after my black list for referer log spam towards this site was to much work.

[KenB]

Just over a year ago, I developed means of automatically detecting and blocking some types of referrer log spam bots and since then have detected and blocked almost 12,000 requests by these referrer bots. Since my methods are very conservative to prevent false positives, I'm quite certain this is only a fraction of the referrer bots who have hit my site.

While referrer bots are not new, I find it disturbing how spammers are using Google's own free tools to pollute Google SERPs. One would think that it would be in Google's own self interest to detect and delete these Blogger sblogs that take advantage YouTube.

[jetteroheller]

I just made a statistic of my main domain for the last years, how many different domains had been found in the referer log

2005: 3953
2006: 4465
2007: 4618

And still 2,5 month to go in 2007