Spam. It's all bloody spam these days.
I'd been wondering why I had a number of strange links in my referrers log – links that go to sites that don't apparently refer to me at all. The sites that spider I know about, but some of these sites appeared to be blogs yet didn't link to me at all. One of them was a porn site.
Via Long Story, Short Pier, comes the information that these blogs are relying on curious bloggers clicking on the link in their logs, and on getting enough referrals to make it into the published referrers list thus getting yet more clicks from curious readers, in order to improve their Google ranking. It's a sort of referrers log spam. There's a lot more information on this thread at The Protagonist Community.
It's a shame, really, that blogs have suddenly become the target of spammers. I had my first comment spam the other day. Thankfully I'm not suffering in the same way that some MT users are, but it's only a matter of time before the spammers find a way to automatic comment spamming for Blog City as they have done for other blog hosts. At that point, if the good people at Blog City can't deal with it, comments may have to go, which would be a shame.
Why is it that whenever something fun and interesting comes along, someone somewhere finds a way to ruin it?
Curiously enough I went to look at all the fake blogs listed at the Protagonist, and they've all been taken down. Either there's a “could not connect to server” error, or they're displaying the same test page. So maybe they got scared that their scam was rumbled.
Visit me @ http://blues.blog-city.com/
So that explains all those links in my referrer logs. I am glad I do not display my top referrers.
Visit me @ http://bloughts.blog-city.com
Blues – the links I had were different to the one listed on Protagonist, but I'm sure that at least one was a blog front for something, and one definitely was a porn site because there was porn on it. Yeuch.
Plus I had strange peaks in my stats which can more easily be explained by a spammer having a go than the mass psychic linking of 360 people around the world who all decided to visit me at once. 😉
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