Referrer Spam

[OzBevNet]

I am getting alot of Referrer Spam, it is driving me nuts, I want to know what official policy AlphaOne Technology has in place to combat this issue,
My website is choked, bandwidth waste should be an issue! Has anyone else experienced this recently and can someone recommend a solution?

Background Info

 

One of the more recent types of spam on the Internet is what's known as referer spam. Basically, bad guys set-up scripts to 'hit' a website and leave whatever URL they want as the referer. Some people have referer logs available publicly (intentionally or not), so there might be a chance that the spammers get some kind of benefit from littering web server logs with their URLs. Not many people actually make their referer logs available to the general public anymore, but the referer spammers continue. (No, the rel="nofollow" thing didn't really help any.)

Personally, I'm fed up with them. I don't have my referral URLs available to the public anywhere, but the spammers don't seem to care and continue to hit my site with their viagra-xxx.info sites as the referer. It wasn't bad for a while, but as I took measures to stop them, they increased their efforts. At one point this last weekend, they were hitting the same page 20+ times per second, basically DDoSing my site. Besides making the site inaccessible to my human visitors, the bots from Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines can't reach it either. So, I started searching the web for ways to combat the stupid refferer spammers who were DDoSing my site. While there's no foolproof protection, or even an absolute way to contact them, I offer some pointers picked up over the weekend to stop the madness.

Referer Spam Redux (MLP)

By kpaul Tue Feb 15th, 2005 at 11:13:45 AM EST

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/2/14/02558/3376


Thanks

Bruno

[AlphaWolf]

I took a look at your logs and am baffled by what you see as a problem.

In January your site got around 1500 visits, April 1500, May 1900 and June 1800.  Web traffic accounts for about 800 mb in June, which is a large jump from May - BUT over 200 MB of that is search engines.  If you were being spammed as you say you are, the average length of time spent on your site would be extremely low.  Usually over 90% of visitors staying less than 30 seconds.  You are under 50% that stay less than 30 seconds.

If you were being spammed you would have virtual no percentage of people bookmarking your site as a favorite.  Yet you have over 10%!

And trust me - if anyone was doing a DOS on your site, our server would know it.

I have to ask what makes you think that this is an issue that needs to be addresses?

peace

Wolf

[AlphaWolf]

I just went in to take a look at the main page of your site to see if maybe it was loading slowly and that is what caused you to think you were being DDOS'd, and you have something set incorrectly either in your .htaccess file or using redirection.  The site can not be reached because something is looping a redirect.

[AlphaWolf]

But my question is WHY do you care?  No one but you sees the referrer lists?

Help me to understand what the problem is exactly.  Most of those referrers are your own site.

[OzBevNet]

I have just published the Latest Referers module in the front page of OzBevNet.com, visitors and regulars usually click them.

Cheers

Bruno

[AlphaWolf]

Why in the world do you do that?  Its just providing free advertising for unknown entities.  And also asking to get spammed

[OzBevNet]

The Mambo Module has a bad word list  , I am hunting a list down. It seems I have to enter the bad url/websites manually. Bummer

Another late night!

Thanks

Bruno

[AlphaWolf]

Can you please explain why this is such an issue?  As I said, reviewing your stats there is really nothing major amiss at all.