Referrer spam -- any point?

[mikomido]

Would it be a good idea to get backlinks by sending requests to tons of sites with your URL in the referrer? Many sites have public stats, and these link back without using rel="nofollow".

Has anybody thought of this? Would it help in ranking?

[vincevincevince]

Perhaps I could refer you to some of these threads on the topic?

Search: Referer Spam [google.com] (1020 results)
Search: Log Spam [google.com] (2240 results)

To answer your questions - no it won't help your page rank, yes it is spamming, and yes people have thought of it before.