Is referrer spam getting you down? Killing refferer spam has become an obsession for Dorothea at Caveat Lector over the past week, and she shares some useful tips on how to eradicate it, along with a narrative of her own experiences. Don’t know what referrer spam is? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:
When someone accesses a web page, i.e. the referee, by following a link from another web page, i.e. the referrer, the referee is given the address of the referrer by the person’s internet browser. Some websites have a referrer log which shows which pages link to that site. By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referrer, that message or internet address then appears in the referrer log of those sites that have referrer logs. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referrer log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer’s sites, by getting the referrer logs of many sites to link to them.
Here also is a Wired article about referrer spam back when it first became a known problem for bloggers (in 2002).
Laurabelle builds upon Dorothea’s solutions at her own blog as well.
At this point, I’m just happy to have dealt with my comment spam. Thanks to Spam Karma, I didn’t have to manually delete all of the 100 spam comments I received last night. But I’m glad there are swanky techie librarians like Laurabelle and Dorothea out there who are finding ways to kill annoying referrer spam.
