I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this recently but I am starting get what seems to be known as “referrer spam”. I won’t publicise them by providing a link but “devaddict” and “webdevboard” both seem to be offenders.
The sort of people who send spam have now progressed to writing web crawlers which leave their trail in peoples referers lists (like mine at the bottom left of the page). I only display the list of referers because I find it interesting to see where people are coming to me from but if it’s going to be abused I’ll simply remove it or write a quick “black-list” function.
Once again the mentality of these people astounds me. Yes, they might get an initial hit rate increase on their sites but as soon as people realise what has happened, do you think that they’ll continue to visit the site? I certainly wouldn’t and I don’t think many others would. Maybe they operate on the same margins as span and only need that one person in a thousand to survive.
It’s bloody annoying though.
I believe it also increases their Google PageRank enormously. I think that is the main reason it is done, not to get people to click from the blogs to their sites.
I found this site because I was looking up “devaddict” in a search engine. Recently three people with that brand plus .com in their email addresses subscribed to a Yahoo! Group mailing list that I moderate. I thought it a bit suspicious and wondered if it was some sort of spamming racket. Have you any advice to offer about this? Should these email subscribers be booted? Are they likely to be collating other group members’ email addresses when they post to the group?
I don’t know who these guys are but I don’t like their methods so have blocked any reference to them in my referers list. I suggest other people do the same.
When they first appeared I had to register on their website to find out more and I assume they have sold that address, but it was a spam one which I use anyway so can’t prove that.