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What to do about referers I don't like
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 12:01 am    Post subject: What to do about referers I don't like Reply with quote

I was thinking my visitor stats were very gratifying. Checking the details of referers I found a number of urls which, if they showed up in my email would be getting junked very fast - the usual cards, enhancements etc.
I have no interest in attracting these to my blog and would like to have stats that more accurately reflect the sort of community of readers I'd like to attract. I assume there is a way of blocking these from future access. Advice please.
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 1:44 am    Post subject: Re: What to do about referers I don't like Reply with quote

What you are looking at here is referer spam. When someone clicks a link to your blog on another webpage, the request to access your blog also contains the page which referred that visitor to you. This is known as a referer, and it is indeed a misspelling, one which has stuck over the years.

Referer spamming is the process of forging requests to a website, sending fake requests to a web server for the purpose of leaving referer information in your access logs.

Some blog systems used to display a dynamically updated list of Recent Referers on their home page, so spammers would send forged web page requests to a popular blog in order for a link to the spammer's site to appear on the blog. The theory was that the outgoing link would increase the ranking in Google for the spammers site, not to mention get a few clicks from the curious.

Since our system does not generate a list of Recent Referers for display on your blog, the spammers don't get much benefit from the practice, and all we as bloggers end up with is decreased utility of our Site Stats...

At this time, we do not have any tools which allow you to prevent Referer spam once you notice it in your logs. Most referer spammers are sending these requests from a distributed and changing set of computers so it is difficult to determine before the fact what is referer spam and what is a valid referer. Our developers are looking into this and other issues related to securing your weblog and we expect to be adding additional features to the service in the future.
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 2:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks John
I guess part of my concern was whether these links are likely to have a negative impact on page ranking. Would you or anyone here know about that?
Des
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2005 2:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There would be no effect whatsoever on search engine page rank. None of this is external or public, the only person who sees the referer is you.
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qureus
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 1:43 am    Post subject: i'm freaking out after looking at the 4th's stats Reply with quote

Hi John,

I wasn't getting too much referrer spam until the 4th and now those b**tards are filling up a big chunk of my referer stats. If we can't block them, is there a way to strip them out of our web stats so that we can get a truer picture of visitations? I was getting all excited about probable RSS visitations until I saw the referers.

Qureus

P.S. Aaaaaaaaaah! These flipping buggers.
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john
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Joined: 16 Mar 2004
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:39 pm    Post subject: Re: i'm freaking out after looking at the 4th's stats Reply with quote

At this time, there is no method available to block or remove them from your stats. We are working on solutions to this problem.
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John

I appreciate you are working on a solution. In the meantime I share Qureus' annoyance. I've been trying to sort out what my stats mean now.

On the one hand I have pleasingly growing numbers of Hosts/Visitors and page views, and on the other I have a whole bunch of what look pretty clearly like referer spam hits. But when I look at the total referer hits I get only about half the number of Distinct Hosts/ Visitors. I think I must be comparing apples and oranges.

How do you suggest I get some idea of how many of the visits are likely to be real - either from a linked directory or a live bod and how many are suspect?

I feel I may be missing something really obvious here. I'm happy to email you my stats so you can see what I'm talking about, if that would help.

Des
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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artatcomo



Joined: 10 Jun 2004
Posts: 18
Location: Saint Paul, MN

PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 8:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This past week I have seen close to a thousand referrals from the poker sites. My bandwidth usage has more than doubled. Yesterday about superbowl time my stats went to zero. My site is unavailable. Could it be that my host, Blogmedia, has succumed to this barrage of referral spam.
http://art.blogx.com/
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 11:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

des wrote:
On the one hand I have pleasingly growing numbers of Hosts/Visitors and page views, and on the other I have a whole bunch of what look pretty clearly like referer spam hits. But when I look at the total referer hits I get only about half the number of Distinct Hosts/ Visitors. I think I must be comparing apples and oranges.


Well, there is really no relationship between Distinct Hosts/ Visitors and Referers, they are apples and oranges. Check out this section of the manual and let us know if you are able to get a better understanding on these elements of web stats:

http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82468.html

The pages you should look at are at:

http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82469.html
http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82475.html

des wrote:
How do you suggest I get some idea of how many of the visits are likely to be real - either from a linked directory or a live bod and how many are suspect?


The referer summary spammers should be obvious... There's no direct way to tell how many distinct hosts they represent from our Site Stats.


Last edited by john on Mon Feb 07, 2005 12:25 pm; edited 1 time in total
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john
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 12:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

artatcomo wrote:
This past week I have seen close to a thousand referrals from the poker sites. My bandwidth usage has more than doubled. Yesterday about superbowl time my stats went to zero. My site is unavailable. Could it be that my host, Blogmedia, has succumed to this barrage of referral spam.
http://art.blogx.com/


I don't think your site being unavailable has anything to do with referer spam. There simply don't appear to be any DNS records for your hostname 'art.blogx.com' so no browsers would know how to find it...
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 7:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John

Thanks. I've been through all that and think I have a better understanding now.

Des
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John wrote
Well, there is really no relationship between Distinct Hosts/ Visitors and Referers, they are apples and oranges. Check out this section of the manual and let us know if you are able to get a better understanding on these elements of web stats:

http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82468.html

The pages you should look at are at:

http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82469.html
http://demo.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2004/6/3/82475.html
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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qureus
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 11:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi John,

This whole discussion thread on spamming, and related ones on trackbacks, is highly beneficial.

From looking at this post, here's what my understanding about the referral spamming (just trying to confirm my understanding).

- Referral spammers do show up as distinct hosts but only one time per specific website. So while a site like texas hold em might send 20 requests from a particular domain name, it would only be counted as 1 distinct host. Which means that they don't pad the visitors as much as they might otherwise appear to (although they are crafty and do all kinds of variations on their domain name).

- Since referrers can only be seen by the blog admin, the only point to their game seems to be to get the blog admins to click on their sites to find out who these irritating folks are in order to improve their own search engine page rankings.

In other thoughts, I appreciate all that BlogHarbor is doing to address this problem and know it must demanding. Here's a thought for an admin tool. It would be helpful to blog admins if we had a convenient way to go in and do some sort of global purge of unwanted trackbacks. Maybe something along the lines of what you do for global deletes on posted articles.

I don't mind having to do some clean up but your current tool is a bit cumbersome to clean up trackback spamming.

Thanks!
Q
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john
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Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 12:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

- Referral spammers do show up as distinct hosts but only one time per specific website.

Not necessarily. These spammers are sending their requests from different IP addresses, which is what makes them so hard to stop. It's like the whack a mole game. Smack one down, and another pops up somewhere else...

- Since referrers can only be seen by the blog admin, the only point to their game seems to be to get the blog admins to click on their sites to find out who these irritating folks are in order to improve their own search engine page rankings.

In the case of our system, yes, that is the only benefit to the referer spammers since we do not make referers public.

Here's a thought for an admin tool.

We are working on end user tools to combat this issue, as well as additional proactive protection.

I don't mind having to do some clean up but your current tool is a bit cumbersome to clean up trackback spamming.

There is no need at all to clean up trackback spams. We're doing a purge of these spams each business day, if you don't see your trackback spams deleted after one business day, send us an email and we'll make sure that your spams are removed during the next batch delete.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 3:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Me: Referral spammers do show up as distinct hosts but only one time per specific website.

You: Not necessarily. These spammers are sending their requests from different IP addresses, which is what makes them so hard to stop. It's like the whack a mole game. Smack one down, and another pops up somewhere else...


Me again: Hmmmm. I'm wondering if we're talking the same thing. For example, here are a few of my referrer stats from yesterday:
http://online-casinos.6q.org/ (9 requests)
http://video-poker.6q.org/ (6 requests)
http://casino-games.6q.org/ (5 requests)
http://online-casino.6q.org/ (separate lline item with another 4 requests)

I assume these URLs are from the same bloody spammer. But wouldn't your stats app see these as just 3 distinct hosts that made 24 referrals? I wouldn't count these as up to 24 distinct hosts would I?

And why would the second online-casino.6p.org show up as a separate line item? Is is the timing between visits?



Me: I don't mind having to do some clean up but your current tool is a bit cumbersome to clean up trackback spamming.

You: There is no need at all to clean up trackback spams. We're doing a purge of these spams each business day, if you don't see your trackback spams deleted after one business day, send us an email and we'll make sure that your spams are removed during the next batch delete.


Me again: Oh wow, didn't know that so I've been manually cleaning up. This is wonderful and I'll start looking for it tomorrow.

Thanks!
Q
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 4:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My mistake, I was thinking trackback spam and you were talking referer spam... Argh.

If you look at Line 1 and 4 they are not the same URL. One has a word that is singular and one has a word that is plural.
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