Another type of spam

  • For those of you who have hacks installed that list back referers on the site, I had someone try something a little different this week – they hit the site at a somewhat elevated rate (~275 visits to index.php in less than 60 minutes), putting a fake referer in their request. Nathan Young’s refererLib (which I run a modified version of, has an option to check if the referring page has a link to your site. However, I’ve never enabled this, as it could be used to make my server DoS a site.
    The solutions are:
    * Don’t show your referers as hyper-links
    * Show them as links, but put them through a local redirect script
    * Police your site frequently
    My “visitor” was especially ironic, as his site (according to babelfish’s translation from German) was basically marketing tools around search-engine placement.
    My entry about the “genius”

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  • You are right, this guy is someone who provides services for “search engine optimizations”. Workshops, tools for testing your se-position and stuff like that. Too bad he isn’t in located in Germany (but in Austria instead) and he didn’t do that stuff on my blog…
    cu, otaku

    I’ve had these folks hitting my blog for weeks now, but it is useless to them since I don’t show referrers on the pages anyway. And this is one reason I don’t.

    Thread Starter bdjohns1

    (@bdjohns1)

    Yeah, I’d probably just cut off the links, but I think it does serve a useful purpose…a couple sites that I get a lot of refers from are helpful to my PageRank (my iPod car install article in particular). Me linking back to them is helping too.
    I sent him an e-mail saying, “look, I caught you red-handed and banned you from my referer log, and I’ve posted an article on my site which mentions you in not the best of light. Do it again, and I’ll have your ISP yank your website”. Haven’t gotten any hits from him since then. It’d be poetic justice if my article ends up showing in a search for CPC-Consulting, and especially if it shows before his own site. ??
    *insert evil laugh here*
    –Ben

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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