Recently I've seen several hits from various strange websites. (mikesspot.com, a-b-l-o-g.com, worldnewslog.com, malixya.com, and kwlablog.com to name a few.) All these sites are the same -- powered by Movable Type blog. But they're not personal blogs, they're tailored feeds from a bazillion news sources. They all have different themes: one is LA news, one focuses on Iraq, another focuses on other blogs. Go to any one of these sites that have sent one or two people my way and you'll find the same thing, despite the theme: eight recent entries from the last few hours all linking to various sites plus archive navigation that doesn't work. There's a list of links allowing you to read the previous day's, week's, even month's entries, but none of the links work. Each of these sites is like this.
It's very bizarre. I find out that there was a link on these sites to my work, but by the time I go to their site to see exactly what they linked to, the link is gone. All these links started showing up at about the same time. All these sites are focused on completely different things. I really don't recall posting something on my site about a blog in Los Angeles talking about file-sharing Iraqi fast cars. But one day, BAM! Several diverse blogs that don't work properly decided what I was talking about was EXACTLY what they're all about.
Posted at November 19, 2003 08:47 AM
Did you notice that they only read a single page from your site, usually the main page? It's curious behavior.
At first I thought this was someone running a proxy that lets the user set the referrer to an arbitrary URL, except the usage patterns do not show any other activity aside from fetching the page (no images, no stylesheets, no peripheral downloads). Then it struck me.
Referrer Log spam.
There are a lot of sites out there that post their referrer logs in a visible place. In theory, a robot like googlebot may view the referrer listing as a link page. If the spammers play the numbers, this may result in the bots believing that those links are legitimate.
I would not be surprised at all if the same people who were doing weblog comment spam were behind this... all of those bogus hits came from a machine in the Romanian educational network.
Posted by: Rob Menke at November 19, 2003 01:41 PMI've been seeing those referrals, too, and they're starting to really annoy me.
Posted by: Layla at November 19, 2003 10:37 PM