Weird external referrers

Why are these sites linking to us?

[blang]

I've been slowly altering the companies website and moving towards a more modern, web standards compliant, full SEO site (as opposed to the hacky FrontPage & Dreamweaver #*$! they frankensteined together). In doing so, I've spent more time in the past month than I had in previous years combined reviewing our server logs and stats generated by AWstats on the host. At any rate, I initially spotted some hotlinking issues and quickly put a stop to that, but I'm still seeing some odd websites that are showing up as major referrers, i.e. we're linked on their site for some reason. One of them seems to be a pirate (as in pirated movies, games, etc) forum that is entirely in Russian (we're a small retailer in Southern California), and another is some website that seems to be a portal for credit score links. The first makes 21% of external referrers. Neither have anything to do with our business.

Does anyone regularly see weirdness such as this? Something to be concerned about?

MODS: please move this thread to a more appropriate forum if necessary, I wasn't sure where to post. Thanks-

[rocknbil]

YES! I do see odd inbound links, another example, a sports betting site to our site that's so far from sports and gambling it's comical. I've kept quiet out of ignorance. :-P

Wild guesses, they are hoping you'd link back to them? Or requested a link exchange that you ignored, they put it on their site and forgot to check back with you, or it was requested via automation and they don't even know it's linking to you? Populating their links section in some vague attempt to emulate "real content?"

Or is there a more sinister reason someone might impart? Log spamming comes to mind if your stats are public - which ours aren't and yours shouldn't be. That in itself might be a reason to link to you, in hopes your stats are public.

[mack]

Could be a simple case of log spam. The site runs a bot to make you think there is a link pointing to your site from their domain. This makes you visit to see whats goign on. Now just imagine they have hit thousands of other sites, it leads to an increase in traffic.

Mack.

[blang]

Thanks for the replies; no, our logs / stats are behind our host's login gateway, so they _should_be_ kept private. I say should because we're on a shared server. Otherwise, even if the current webmaster was savvy enough to do a link exchange, it wouldn't be with these sites (I should mention there are valid sites that do represent our industry that link to us). It is possible someone has put up a forum post that somehow discusses our site as a possible target or one of our previous employees has posted there. At any rate I'm going to keep an eye on them from now on.

[tangor]

After checking out 40-50 of these sites over the years and finding NOTHING that links to me I no longer worry about it. Some of the more aggressive link spammers (as that is what I believe them to be) get a ban in htaccess just to reduce the bandwidth (some of my files are 1.5mb-3mb in size).