From some time now in my web access logs I get some people coming from sites that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of my site: such examples

dating-e-site.info
rental-car-e-site.info
dating-site-e-site.info
dating-services-e-site.info
online-gambling-4u.net
texas-hold-em-video-best-winning-chances.info

Some of these domains do not even work. Also they particularly visit the pages with a PR of 3-4. One of my pages also got URL spammed with the kind of sites you see above using my 'comments' script...:(

Are these just robots scanning for high PR pages and trying to spam their URL's and putting custom referrers on so people click them?:eek:

That's odd. You wouldn't see these sites in your referrer logs if they did not link directly to you. IIRC, your logs will reflect a direct request if your site is accessed any other way besides following a link. Perhaps there's some mechanism on these sites generating random links to various sites and your site is in the mix. Are they link farms? I'm a little scared to look...

Only two of them work, and they yes they look like link farms.
I only submitted my site to such sites once, (which I now regret) about a year ago. And not to those sites... + I dont think they keep the links anyway...

I use a PHP script to log visits to my site. (BBClone)
It logs the $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]. Could it be that they found a way to set that environmental variable as they wish?

I don't know enough about the browser-bot/Web logs handshake to give you a good answer, but I can't think of a good reason why they would bother to do this.

Here's an odd question - have you considered contacting the site owners and addressing them with your curiousity?

I just did a WHOIS on the domains above:

All the . info domains (except the last) were registered on the same date, same registrar, under different names but the same email domain:

marketing-support.info

That domain doesn't work...
:eek:
I wont bother to contact them as they do not even have a real website and there is a high chance that they spammed my pages before.

I am still confused why do people bother doing these kind of things... It's just wierd. I do not see anything they could gain from this: They probably invented a new kind of spamming: Referer spamming...:confused:

I also noticed bunch of domains like that, in my stats/logs. Maybe these domains/sites belong to spammers, and their robots were crawling the sites in search for email addresses?

It could be the case, and maybe they are looking for pages with forms that they can spam.
For now I'll activate a ban script to prevent those referrers from ever accesing my site.
I'm curious what other people think.

I have a lot of porn sites linking to me :)
No reason though... just cause they want to.

It's a huge read, but try out this thread:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=337517

I looked deeply into this thing, and as you can see it's been discussed on WHT in several threads at different times, the problem is nobody seems to know exactly what these type of people's game is.

I stopped short of buying the books to find out.

What I think, is your content is ripped temporarily, or included to be spidered somehow, the point is they're trying to place their affiliate-program links highly in searches. This is why you're visited by all their stupid sites. It doesn't matter if the Google search is for webhosting, the jewelry site also places well, as does their gambling affiliate link page. Likewise, if Google's searched for Jewelry, you'll see their gambling and webhosting pages. It's really hard to nail down, because as pointed out, these pages disappear quickly. My favorite was the one using WHT's content, but that was gone almost as soon as I found it.

They use these bogus pages to link together all their categories. The problem is, these pages are designed to pull the spiders in (which they do) and move the humans out -- do you back up and try your results list again, or select a likely candidate from their choices? Congrats, you've made their day by clicking through.

I haven't looked at the sites in question in this thread, but is the content spider-food? If it isn't, you can search for any content on the page to see how widespread it's use is, and maybe where it originates. I have recently seen this dubious technique (something similar, anyway) applied to ******'s customer testimonials, but haven't had time to pursue it.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=348848

The black-background page, if it still exists, was hosted on ****** when I posted the link to poppalon.com. I seriously doubt ****** is implicit in whatever this is, but it sure isn't limited to the one host discussed in that other thread.

This is what I was afraid of, people or robots scamming my pages.
I haven't looked at the sites in question in this thread, but is the content spider-food?
If you mean my pages, yes I have done a lot of SEO on them.

I had a look on the other threads and it really is the same technique used on me. The sad thing is that there is no way to indentify these robots or idiots and block them...

yeah log spamming, it's been around for a while now..
probably the next 'epidemic' spammers are using.
thankfully not alot of people know how to do it, nor should they.
try contacting there host's or upstream providers they might have some sort of policy to stop those sites from doing it.

p.s. your stats password protected?

The log spamming stuff is pretty obvious. My question, and one I'm seeing raised by others more and more often, is where to draw the line on what's ethical SEO and what is disgraceful behavior. Here's another thread:

http://forums.iwdn.net/viewtopic.php?t=370&sid=dc429e8f7089d99fbc05befc10cdd8e7

Originally posted by dirmass
If you mean my pages, yes I have done a lot of SEO on them.

Actually, I meant the sites you're seeing in your referrers. I get confused as to where the line is between an allowable link farm which provides me with useful information, and this page:

http://www.web-web-guide.com/hosting/Cheap_Web_Site_Hosting.shtml

which seems to run afould of the following section from Google's "what not to do" page:

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

I couldn't find the Google page which talks about not writing content directly for their spider. Again, where to draw the line between optimizing one's text, and writing incoherent babble, which is what I mean by "spider food", like this example from the link above:

This is a Database Ecommerce Templates targeted directory, a collection of related pages. This is a Web Content Management targeted directory, a collection of related pages.

If that is not enough, search for Ecommerce Website Designs Uk at our unique information and resource pages.

This directory about Dedicated Managed Web Hosting is the flagship WEBSITE. There are many reasons why Free Web Hosting Ftp directories are a great place for you to find the information you are looking for, explore them now!

Designed for people like you, who are looking for information on Free Frontpage Servers. Simply explore the links.

Constantly updated, it contains valuable information. You will find many, many sites about Juno Webhosting!

I think a Supreme Court justice famously said this about porn: when it comes to search-engine spam, I know it when I see it. I've seen the argument about page rank, but it seems to me these people don't care how well any particular page in their scheme ranks, I figure there must be some kind of aggregate benefit.

if websites stats are not password protected a website utilizing log spamming would probably benefit from a backlink; because of the log spamming they are doing.

the online dating & porn industries are famous for log spamming to help boost there backlinks & overall pagerank.

another benefit would be the traffic they get through, just people curious where the referral is coming from, even though they wouldn't see a link to there site.

a few hosting companies which were utilizing log spamming were ousted on wht mid last year, hostitcheap and even a bigger company 'spry' are known log spammers. (haven't seen any referrals from those sites for a while though)

i'm just glad it's not that widespread & mainstream yet, but you wait a few years and it probably will be.

the days going to come where you can't check your stats to see where your incoming traffic is coming from, because it will be filled with fake referrals.

nows the time for web hosting companies to jump on it and not host these sites that do it.

log spammers / referral spammers whatever you like to call them, i consider them low-class and in the same league as 'email spammers'.

My web stats are not passworded and the main page that shows them is actually indexed by Google. What has been said so far made me believe that I need some .htaccess protection.

i consider them low-class and in the same league as 'email spammers'.

I think they are even lower then that. Email spamming is pretty old now and basically anyone can do it to an extent. But this : what lenghts you have achieve to exploit innocent websites and web services.. It's disgusting.