questionable Referrers to my site on Logs

[river_east]

Is there any issues regarding adult sites directing to my site. I cant find the link to my site anywhere and am wonder how these are becoming referring links. Any insight on this would be great thanks

[adwatson]

I don't think it can hurt you. It may not help you, but I don't think it'll do any harm - after all you have no control over who links to your site(s), so the search engines can't really ding you for it.

[The Contractor]

Is this showing up in your logs or are there really links on the site?
If it's showing up in your logs then it's only referer spam [google.com].

[edited by: The_Contractor at 4:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2008]

[DavidMata]

Are you sure we are not penalized for such things? I have heard that SEs penalize web sites for having some kinds of linking schemes and strange inbound links.

What if someone sets such a scheme for you? Like a link farm and those things. I have heard about many web sites simply being blacklisted because they used link farming.

I think that SEs in most cases don't penalize for low quality inbound links but I don't know all the details about it.

If someone could clarify this issue it would be great.

[river_east]

my site has tanked and Im just trying to get a handle on why, this seems to be an alarming issue

[daveshap]

I don't think it will necessarily hurt you per se, but it will make it more difficult to make your backlink profile more legitimate in the eyes of Google. I assume these links aren't from trusted parts of the web and if these are the only links you have pointing at your site it will be harder for your site to build trust within your neighborhood.

[river_east]

I have nice page rank of 5 so I have good incoming links...these are really messing things up for me it seems and I have no idea how to stop them...

[The Contractor]

Are there actually links coming from these sites or is it only in your logs as I asked above?

[river_east]

yes just in the logs, so I may be able to block them out?

[The Contractor]

It's simply referrer spam. Your logs are not public are they (no one should see your stats but you)?

You can block referrer spam using methods mentioned in these threads [google.com].

[river_east]

nope nobody can see them but me....thanks for the link

[Bewenched]

One question I have on this subject is:

If you are getting referral spam and you are using google analytics, does google then think your site and the bad referral site are interlinked? Could you be penalized?

[kgam]

I saw this in the logs for one of my sites for 3 or 4 months straight (seemed to let up last month). I have tried looking at the pages listed in my logs as refering pages and cannot find the links to my site/pages.

My SE standings have been rather sporadic since then. The affected site took a dip in SE standings at first, but it recovered and is still ranking overall ok, but there has been an across the board PR drop of 1-2 depending on the page.

Any ideas?

[mcneely]

I don't know about public logs, but ours are behind ssl on the server, meaning you have to login to see them. Bots don't login as far as I know, so our spam referal rubbish is never seen by anyone, 'cept for the actual site owner. (log spammers just are'nt the brightest bunch in the bush you know)

I clean them out. I simply erase them by going into /home/domain/tmp/awstats****mo/date****. mydomain.com.txt.
And I do it for my clients if they ask me to.

Log spam is just about as polite as someone coming into your home and doin'-dar-dookie-dog all over your front room floor.

[martinibuster]

...saw this in the logs for one of my sites for 3 or 4 months straight...

Let's put this one to bed. :)

• Referral spam are fake referrals. There are no links to your site. It's a fake referral.
  
• The purpose is so the links to the rogue sites show up on your online logs.
• IF your logs are public, they will show up as a link from your public log file pages to the fake referral page, i.e. the rogue site.
• IF your logs are private, it doesn't matter because search engines can't see them.
• If your logs are public, then you now have a new project for this week getting rid of it.

You can now stop worrying about referral spam.

All the best,

mb ;)-Y