No more recent referrers
I disabled the recent referrers section in the sidebar tonight. Part of how your browser works, is it sends the URI or the page you are on to the page you go to next, that's called a referrer. I store that information, and then when people visit the site, I was displaying the last ten referrers that came from other web sites.
The Problem
Just like any other computer technology, it's fairly simple to fake data, and convince your browser to either not send referrer information, or to send false information. It's even possible to automate the process, so that a computer sends false referrer information to a site.
That's precisely what was happening on this site. People set up computers to send false referrer data with URIs that promote or sell their own products. So rather than my site displaying an accurate list of where people were coming from, it was displaying link after link to falsified spam.
The Motivation
So why do people do that? No, not just to be mean, they do it because search engines rank pages based on who links to them. I was placing links on my site (with an automated process) and if a search engine visits my site and sees links to other sites, the search engine will believe that I'm linking to them for a good reason, and in turn, the search engine will consider the other sites to be important enough to link to.
Those sites, by the way, are not important enough to link to.
But that explains their motivation. The no doubt search the internet for "recent referrers" or the like, and then flood those sites with their own URIs.
The Bandage
This site is fairly low-profile, so I tried to get away with re-directing phony-referrer traffic to a dummy page that displayed a link to the page they were trying to get to. It seemed like a fine solution. I didn't record referrer information on that page, so it defeated most spam, and it still provided a valid link for actual human beings trying to access content in the event they should be accidentally considered spam.
That was a fine solution for several months, but ultimately, I'm one man, and I can't possibly work as fast as one computer, and I suspect there are many computers working against me.
The Conclusion
I'm no longer going to publicize the latest referrers to this site. If I remove the motivation, the spammeurs will move on and that will free up a little server time for actual people who visit.
The Post-conclusion
Since few conclusions are truly final, and since English doesn't afford us a word for the after-conclusion, and before I completely get lost on this tangent, I'm trying to decide what to do with the space. I could post links to friends' sites. I should probably do that anyway. I could implement a blog-roll, but I'm not sure that's for me. Or I could devise a better devise system for displaying referrer data. I'm certainly open for ideas.
- under:
- about the site
- Posted on
- 2006-02-08
Comments:
Wow, you just did this [i]today[/i], because I just looked at it this afternoon.
Ah well.
Yes, I did it last night. I had to. Today I received hundreds of bogus referrers. Most of which contained /wwwboard/ in the URI. I suspect that there's a forum out there with a gigantic security hole, and people are taking advantage of it.
It's a shame, it is.
so if i come here from dirtynakedsluts.ca, that would have been in the side?
dammit.
by the way, check out dirtynakedsluts.ca for all your dirty naked canadian slut needs!
Aren't all canadian's dirty naked sluts? :P
I had to take down the feature for that from my site too :(
This article is closed to further commentary. But you can always contact me directly.