How bad is referer spam?

December 21, 2004 | Audioblogs and Podcasting, Blogging, General | By: Mark VandeWettering

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.

Comments

Comment from Brian Austin
Time 12/22/2004 at 1:42 pm

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.