Unknown links in Error Logs

Looks like the post deleted the referring links in my previous post – there are 4 different links, all of which are most assuredly spam links. I’ve scanned my site with Sucuri and didn’t find anything, so I’m at a loss here.

Some of those links were a bit unsavory, so I removed them and trimmed it down to just the one entry.

What you’re seeing is standard every-day referrer spam. It’s like email or comment spam, but for your stats. <sarcasm>Yay!</sarcasm>

A Referrer is a record of the URL that a visitor came to your site from. When I find a link to your site on Google for example, and click through it to your site, my browser says “Hi there, I just came from Google.com.”

Now, in your stats, this is pretty handy, and very cool. Enter the referrer spammers, who pretty much ruin that for everyone.

The referrer records can be faked, sadly. When you see referrer spam, it means either a bot is running around dropping fake referrers behind it, or one of your legitimate visitors has a compromised browser extension.

The good news is, most stats plugins/packages/services filter out known referrer spam, so you never have to see these mucking up your stats. The bad news is, there really isn’t anyway to keep it out of your logs. A log is there to record every visit, the good ones and the bad ones.

Here’s how you can block them via .htaccess: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Combating_Comment_Spam/Denying_Access#Deny_Access_Referrer_Spammers

With that said though, maintaining that list can become very tedious very quickly, and if your stats are properly filtering them out already, I don’t think there’s a reason to bother with blocking them.

Thanks for the quick reply.

So I’m guessing I also don’t need to worry about the “mod_fcgid: ap_pass_brigade failed in handle_request_ipc function” when it pops up, either?

You should probably report it to your hosting provider.

It’s causing something on the server’s end to not complete properly. Is it urgent? Goodness no, we don’t really care about those junk visits anyway, and it could vary well be something blocking or preventing them that’s causing the server process not to complete.

Is it a problem? Generally I consider anything on the server not functioning properly to be a problem, regardless of who/what it affects.

Fair enough.

On a semi-related topic – I’ve got a phantom link popping up on my signin page. This is another one that I can’t seem to track down, as it does not appear in any of my files.

Here’s a screenshot: https://screencast.com/t/bTLiVjrBgB

Any thoughts on how I might eradicate this little fellow? It popped up beneath the search bar in my site’s front-end, too, but I used some CSS code to hide it. Would obviously prefer to get rid of it completely, but don’t know where to start.

And I can always make this a separate topic, if needed – just thought I would throw it out there, since you seem to know your stuff.

Ah, now that is a problem.

Remain calm and carefully follow this guide. When you’re done, you may want to implement some (if not all) of the recommended security measures.