This isn't specific to WP, but you guys are smart and nice... :) I was just checking my site stats on a new stat program my host installed. There are tons on poker sites listed as referrers to my site. Of course if I go to that site theres no link to my site, so I don't understand how it can do that. Also in the 404 error list, the vast majority of those are referred from one poker site, trying to access an old WP site I took down. There are over 2000 of those and from what I can tell this stat thing only started counting on the 12th of this month.
Spam Referrers? (9 posts)
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Mark (podz)
Posted 7 years ago # -
Take a look at this: http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/ref-karma/
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Thanks guys, I will look into those, but since most of them are going to a site I don't even have up anymore, how could that work? Altho I am sure it would be good on my current installs.
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Posted 7 years ago #They are whacking your site and zillions of others in the hope that your referers list is visible to people and more importantly search bots. that way, they get linkage.
Thing is, there are many many many blogs with "Last Referers" listed, and those idiots are, if not causing, at least prolonging this junk.
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Thanks podz. I've thought of putting a referers list up before, I'm glad I didn't figure it out. :)
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davidchait
Posted 7 years ago #just to explain, there are programs these 'spammers' have written that requests a webpage from your site, and 'fakes' the referring site to be some string they specify.
If they are hitting a 404 error quickly, the spam plugins won't help much. You might be able to put something into your htaccess/et al that would immediately 404 anything off your old blog, just so apache doesn't even have to try and search for the directory...
CG-Referrer is another good referrer-spam-blocker, and with every release I update the blacklists (named bots, keywords in the URLs, and specific IP addresses). It catches about 99% in general, 95% when the spammers start playing around with homonyms or switch to new domains or fake up words... I've tried to engineer the blacklist 'phrases' to try to not have false-positive hits.
I also now look for
http://injections in the current requested URL, and stop on that as well -- there may be certain plugins this is incompatible with, but frankly those plugins should change their methodology. (It's used for redirects to other sites in some cases, but could be done encoded when needed, or as a hidden POST variable, rather than in the clear...)I'll have a new alpha release of the CG-PowerPack up tomorrow hopefully, now that I've fixed one or two of my plugins to function better with WP1.5...
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Thanks for the explanation, david! :)
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You can try http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/word-press-1-5-plugin-referer-bouncer/
It is no hassle, no-configuration-required plugin. Install it and forget it. It should take care of your Spam referrer problems.Let me know how it goes.
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