Sudden upsurge in "trash" references

Why am I getting this junk?

[Wlauzon]

Recently, over the past couple of weeks I am seeing a huge jump in the number of "garbage" referrals from link farm and ad farm type sites.

Hundreds of hits, but of course not one single sale out of the thousands.

Anyone else seeing this?

[martinibuster]

Sounds like log spamming.

[caveman]

Could also be a competitor dropping links to your site into those crumby rings and networks in a feeble attempt to get your site in trouble.

[martinibuster]

Did you check to see if your site is actually listed on those pages?

Are they scrapers?

[Wlauzon]

In a couple of them (there are about 6 that keep showing up), if I type in almost any search word nothing at all comes up. Totally blank page, which I thought was a bit.... odd...

I thought it might be from Google partners or something like that, but those are all turned off.

And a lot of the referral links have some "affiliate + numbers" in the URL, which I cannot figure out either.

The competitor thing is a possibility, but it seems to have no real effect except to add a little more spam to the logs. It is not like we are getting swarmed - maybe 100 or so hits a day. I just can't figure out why.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 10:52 am (utc) on Nov. 10, 2006]

[Wlauzon]

I figured it out.

We still had about $45 left over in an old no longer used MIVA account that I decided to flush out the last remaining $$, once that ran out the junk referrals stopped.

Been sitting there for two years, now I recall why we never did anything more with MIVA...

[caveman]

LOL. That would certainly bring the kind of traffic you mentioned. Hehe.