Referrer Spamming

Finally found out why my logs are spammed by websites that bear no relation to my content. It’s known as “referrer spamming” and is a strategy employed to help boost somebody’s link popularity. This is mostly targeted at web-logs (aka blogs or journals) because they often display referring websites as a link on their pages!

I do the same (see towards bottom right side) albeit not displaying them as links. Reading a very eye-opening article on SpywareInfo.com provided me with lots of useful background infos and also provided a solution: Use Apache’s rewrite engine to block spammers. A link to an .htaccess file by Joe Maller comes in very handy to get you started. Simply copy-n-paste and then add your own spamm sites from your log files. I will publish mine as we go along.

You can find my .htaccess file here: htaccess-anti-spam.txt (Updated: 19/6/05). Just add the lines to your existing .htaccess file or create a new one. As far as I know, you only need to put it into your web-root.

And now, happy spammer hunting ;D