How bad is referer spam?

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple
query:

mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) - 
to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ;
+-----+--------------------------+
| cnt | baseDomain               |
+-----+--------------------------+
| 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com  |
| 682 | champvilleclub.com       |
| 682 | ceyloncurry.com          |
| 682 | cbmwyo.org               |
| 289 | brittandersondesigns.com |
| 243 | clevelandfyi.com         |
|  50 | google.com               |
|  16 | google.co.uk             |
|   8 | xopy.com                 |
|   6 | search.yahoo.com         |
+-----+--------------------------+
10 rows in set (1.16 sec)

It’s kind of depressing to find just how many people work that hard to try to spam my silly little site.

Addendum: It seems that virtually all my referer spam comes from four distinct IP addresses. They are now in my blacklist. We shall see how long this holds.

One thought on “How bad is referer spam?”

  1. Brian Austin

    Yeah, I’ve had the very same problem with several blog sites I host for friends. Luckily b2evolution.net has a nifty feature built in that lets it’s sync up with the mothership and keep the blacklist current. You can also submit new sites to the list. I haven’t worked with WordPress, so I’m sure if it has a similar feature or not.

Comments are closed.