Referral spamming for AdSense

Made for AdSense on a new level

[Nikke]

I have taken up the habit to go through my referral logs every day to block referral spammers from my site. They come in all kinds and recently I've even seen some serious sites using this strange technique to catch new visitors (and raise their pagerank).

But today I found two new sites doing it for AdSense clicks! Both sites are in the same area, and both serve up pages with almost nothing but a text logo and two AdSense skyskcrapers.

Almost I wrote. There is some content. At the bottom of the page there is a 50px high iframe stuffed with keywords in the form of scraped content.

Both sites look just the same. Even the skyscrapers had the same color scheme, but they are hosted on different servers with different ISPs.

I sure hope this is a new trend.

[diamondgrl]

Report them. If Google doesn't know about them, it can't be expected to do anything about them.

[Nikke]

Actually, I did play police before posting here.

At the same time I have been trying to figure out how on earth they can have that many ads on their pages.

Just trying the obvious keywords on these pages in Google searches gives no ads whatsoever. But they have somehow managed to come up with combinations that render 11 perfectly targeted ads on both domains.

[Imaster]

All this is so problematic, why can't just Google keep compulsory approval for each website, not just the first registration website?

[dirkji]

Can someone explain to me what referral spamming is?

Thanks,

Dirk.

[Nikke]

Referral spamming... I can talk for hours about it, but in general it is a technique where you unleash a bot that surfs blogs (or sites suspected to be blogs) in order to make an impression in these sites referral logs.

The bot pretends to be coming from a certain site or page, and if the blog visited has a publicly published page with referral data (which very many blogs have) their url will show up in there.

The spoofed referral URL will then get clicked on, at least by the webmaster/blogger and probably also by others. Referral spammers also hope to gain Google PR and whatever MSN Search and Yahoo calls it since search engines regularly spider most blogs.

The NOFOLLOW link attribute was introduced to prevent blog comment spam, but will also do the trick against referral spamming.

More about the NOFOLLOW link attribute:
<snip>

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 5:47 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2005]
[edit reason] no blog/spam links please [/edit]

[dirkji]

Thanks Nikke.

[Nikke]

Come on Brett! You took out a link to Googles official blog.
I know you really don't like the NOFOLLOW link attribute, but that page has been linked to from many other threads about this topic.

It isn't as if I linked to one of my own pages on the topic...

[loanuniverse]

so that is the reason why "g o o g l e b l o g" becomes #!$@ in the url when you post here.

Hmmm, why would anyone think that pointing to the official Google Blog is spam is beyond me.