IHY: blocking referrer spam with htaccess

Apr 15, 2006 - 10:45 am 2 by
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In Referrer Spam - Why you shouldn't publish your Web logs - Best Practices Search Engine Forums, an old thread originally posted by Alan Perkins, was recently revived by IHY member Dave B, who posts an htaccess file that looks like it could make a big dent in referrer spam for web sites that implement it.

Referrer spam is the practice of sending fake visitors with fake referrers to web sites, to have your URL appear in their log files. This is done in the hope that search engines will find the links and boost the spamming site's rankings.

It's not just a search engine spam problem, though: referrer spam can also interfere with traffic analysis. I checked my logs against Dave's htaccess list, and it looks like about 95% of the fake traffic would be blocked. Nice.

 

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