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#1 2008-04-15 23:37:11

els
Moderator
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2004-06-06
Posts: 7,458

Is this just referrer spam?

The last month or so I’ve been getting hundreds (sometimes 50 or more a day) of hits for one particular article page, from all over the world, all different IPs (most of them only 2 or 3 visits), no referrers are logged. I started blocking them in .htaccess, but if it goes on like this I’ll have to add at least a dozen every day…
How am I going to get rid of them? It’s really ruining my stats. I thought about changing the article title (or just the url-only title) and putting a redirect gone in .htaccess for the old one, but that will affect other visitors as well. Though if there is no other way I still could do that, it’s not a very important article ;)

It looks like this in the slimstat logs:

uacity.com	15-04-08	Netscape 4.76	Windows	Ukraine
  /artikelen/clickerforum	22:26:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum	 	 		
brutele.be	15-04-08	Opera 8.00	Windows	Belgium
  /artikelen/clickerforum	21:29:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum	 	 		
218.56.97.177	15-04-08	Firefox 1.6	Windows	China
  /artikelen/clickerforum	21:22:00	 		
comcast.net	15-04-08	Internet Explorer 6.0	Windows	Onbekend
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:29:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	 	 		
sbcglobal.net	15-04-08	Internet Explorer 5.0	Windows	Onbekend
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:29:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	 	 		
comcast.net	15-04-08	Firefox 1.5	Windows	United States
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:26:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	 	 		
comcast.net	15-04-08	Internet Explorer 3.02	Windows	United States
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:15:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	 	 		
rr.com	15-04-08	Internet Explorer 6.0	Windows	United States
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:15:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	 	 		
swbell.net	15-04-08	Onbekend	Onbekend	United States
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:13:00	 		
  /artikelen/clickerforum/	17:14:00

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#2 2008-04-16 06:52:48

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,012
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: Is this just referrer spam?

A google search returns this page on the top but further down there’s is a textpattern powered site. Did you consider making a very small page which uses that address?, The load on the server will probably be less that having to check dozens of referrers in htaccess on every request in your site.


Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#3 2008-04-16 10:03:13

els
Moderator
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2004-06-06
Posts: 7,458

Re: Is this just referrer spam?

colak wrote:

A google search

Huh? How did my page’s url end up in all those search results? As far as I can see they are all forum pages… I wonder if the word ‘forum’ in the article title is responsible for this? If someone understands what happened I’d love to hear it.

Did you consider making a very small page which uses that address?, The load on the server will probably be less that having to check dozens of referrers in htaccess on every request in your site.

Having seen the google search results, I think I am just going to put a redirect gone in .htaccess, and change the url-only title of the article.
Unless someone has a better idea?

Thanks Yiannis, for pointing this out.

Last edited by els (2008-04-16 10:03:45)

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