If you run a blog and keep an eye on your site stats, you might have noticed this:
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them. So visitors to spammed blogs who explore the link lists also find those sites full of porn and sales pitches.
In most cases the link spam appears to have been added to logs by one of several companies that are selling a service they describe as "referral marketing."
That's from a wired.com article, When the Spam Hits the Blogs.
What an annoying development.
(By the way: when you visit Mirabilis.ca, my site logs don't tell me who you are. All I see is that a visitor came here by clicking on a link at some other site, like Cranky Professor or Portage.)
Here's an interesting response to this kind of spam. Mo Morgan's Mastodonte Project page has a little form one can fill out. Whatever you put in the form will show up in the spammer's referral logs.
Posted on October 27, 2002 08:14 AM. Filed under: computers & internet.