Many phoney links in stats this morning

Why?

[HRoth]

This morning I checked my stats and in the inbound links section found many links from places like tax offices, insurance companies, travel sites, and others that have no business linking to me and which in fact AREN'T linking to me but are using that software, don't know its name, that makes like it has created a link to you in order that you go click on the link from your stats and give them a free visit. Thing is, I am nervous that so many appeared overnight. Probably about a hundred. How do these things work? Why would so many turn up so quickly?

[Matt Probert]

This software is very simple. It just makes a request for one of your pages, sending a referer set to a value. To put this process in a loop and make a thousand requests with a thousand different referer values is no more difficult, and it's all automatic. Perhaps someone is "marketing" for a group of web sites and has your URL in a list along with thousands of others, to spam?

Matt

[andrea99]

Yes, I've been dealing with this for months. My site has been targeted by two different spammers, both are targeting single pages and hit them every day hundreds of times.

One is using a single IP and this is simple to block in my .htaccess file. I still get the referrals in my stats but at least the only bandwidth loss is the 404 file which I've made as small as possible.

The other uses hundreds of different incoming IP's but hits the same page every day hundreds of times--he must be using zombie pc's or something. Fortunately that particular page gets very little legitimate traffic so I have replaced that page with a tiny file that explains the situation and has a link to that page at a new address. A redirect would unfortunately just send the bots to the new page.

This kind of thing could overwhelm me and the entire internet if it continues to grow. I'm prepared to go to a dedicated server to sort these out at the server level, but it is a serious threat to commerce in general. These spammers are criminals who should be dealt with harshly. At the moment it's probably not even illegal.

[sugarrae]

If you want hours worth of stuff to read, do a search for "log spamming [google.com]".

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:53 pm (utc) on Jan. 29, 2006]

[HRoth]

Thanks, now I have a name for it at least. I noticed it was a one-shot deal, and my stats are password-protected, so it's not like anyone is going to profit from this unless I click on the urls. As long as my stats are hidden, there is no way this can hurt my site in the search engines, can it?