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What
is Referral Spam & Log Spamming?
You ever look at your logs
and see that someone came into your site following a link from another
site? Yet when you go to that page, your link is nowhere to be found?
If so, you have been referral spammed.
Why do people do this? There
are two main reasons.
The first is to get you to
follow an affiliate link, in the hopes that you just might like what you
see on the page you view, and be enticed to follow it. You will often
see referral spam for products / sites that are somehow related to your
own.
For example, if you have a
parenting site, you might see an affiliate link to a baby product affiliate
program. One of the most popular ones is an amazon referral spam - people
are more likely to click them thinking "wow, my link is on amazon.com,
how cool." But if you make a purchase on Amazon within 24 hours of
clicking that link in your referral logs, it will be your log spammer
who earns the commission on it.
Another reason for log spamming
is for the backlink or pagerank factor. If your stats are available on
a publicly viewable page (ie. if you go to www.yourdomain.com/stats/ to
view your stats without having to enter a username and password) you are
a much greater target. Some stats pages have a pagerank value to them,
and a backlink to the site can help with the search engine rankings. If
you need to password protect your stats so they are no longer publicly
viewable, you can use our Password Protection
Generator.
If you are being log spammed
for the first reason, there isn't much you can do. However, if your stats
are currently on a page that is not password protected, you should contact
your hosting company (or web designer) and ask for password protection
to be placed on it.
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