Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I'm starting to get it not only from "SEO" firms, hosting companies etc (who would naturally target a webmaster) but also from widget stores selling consumer widgets online.
I can see this one getting out of control very quickly. It's not a great problem right now, but to feature high in your logs, they hit you 100 times or more.
Imagine that with 10,000 bots all doing the same - the potential is there to effectively result in a DOS attack.
Is there anything we can do?
TJ
I'm sorry, this was meant for the Webmaster Technology Issues forum, not Business issues - I must have hit the wrong link
If it's coming from the SEO rather than the widget people then couldn't the answer be to unnerve the widget people about the side-effects their campaign is having (ie generating a negative view of their product because of their actions).
As for solutions - didn't the bloggers come up with some tools to combat their versions of this, referrer and comment spam?
- Tony
do you want the world to see your website stats anyway?
The bot only has to request a public page on your site with the spamming websites URL in the referrer field.
The spammers don't check whether or not your logfile data is public - spamming is a carpet-bombing approach.
TJ
i redirect nasty bots to a gay pron site
TJ
Basically major SE bots and major browsers. The rest should RIP.
The bigger problem is that anyone can fake the user agent string.
I presume they do the page request and then disconnect instantly, which would mean at least they're not sucking up bandwidth.
But what would be happening is the php engine will be building the pages.
Had 1,000 like this just today. I can see it escalating.
I don't really understand it for "widget" sites - I can see the logic of spamming webmasters for SEO or hosting related services, but I just can't think that they sell many widgets this way?
TJ
- Tony
Unfortunately due to the carpet-bombing approach of spammers they're indiscriminate about the fact that my logfiles are not public and won't get them anywhere....
My .htaccess grows larger every time I find another. It's easy to add keywords for the worst offenders amongst unrelated sites (webmaster, rx, pron), but this is spreading, and it's not just stores.
What I'd like to see would be a trustworthy list of the most common ref. spammers. I've found one or two webmasters posting them, and obviously there are all those public stats. But it still means checking each time, for those times it looks like a legit link. It would be useful to be able to block more of this in advance.
Where I used to have hundreds of lines in succession, several times every day and have posted several times accordingly, I now have maybe one line twice a week.
Now, for those who would argue they are using different tactics for different reasons. You may be right. Back then, they were targetting those whose stat pages are exposed to the 'Net and today they appear as though they are simple, single referer string.
For some type of sites it may very well be increasing, but not in my house. :)
In past threads the common wisdom was '...leave them alone, you'll never be able to stop them'. Not being one to capitulate, I banned via IP Number and eventually they got tired of being force fed 403s.
Usually I politely ask them to remove my domain name from their spam list (this has never worked).
Next I do a WHOIS lookup, find their host, and report them to their host for spamming. On a couple of occasions the spammers have had Adsense on their websites so I reported them to Google as spammers who are directing visitors to their website by log spamming. On two occasions I have revisited the sites I have reported and found that they no longer have Adsense; I don't know if my efforts were the cause of their removal, but I believe they could have contributed.
If every webmaster who is sick of log spamming took the time to report at least 3 spammers per month, we could beat these spammers.
Some I've seen in the past will play ping pong with you if you actually click on the link - drop another referer shortly afterwards. Sorta like clicking on the 'remove me' link in spam mails - 'hey, we gotta live one here, let's do it again!'.
I've started to use IP block but the same spammers return with new IPs.
Does anyone have a list of spammer IPs? If you do, please consider "sticky-mail"-ing them to me.
Thanks.
