Referrer spam, what’s next?
I simply ignored the adult website referrer spam, expected it, after all sex sells and they’ll do anything (legal or not) to drive eyes to those popup ads and sites. But a presidential campaign weblog spamming other web sites referrer logs???
Lately “a new company that is responsible for helping website owners attract traffic to their offerings” has been showing up in my referrer logs. Until today it was generally just their own website ( which was just a very empty portal the last time I looked) as referrer, but no actual link or mention of this site there. Today Joe Lieberman’s crew from his blog (no, I will not provide a link) appeared to have linked to me, but on a second look at the referrer string it was actually the “new company” running some spam script for Lieberman’s web site. If the Lieberman campaign knows about this type of crap they must be extremely desperate. I wasn’t going to vote for him before this happened, and now that I just gave Crazy Joe 2 minutes of my time — I damn sure won’t be voting for him now.
Oh and Mr. Lieberman that vote and this short “endorsement” were lost to you (in part) by “…2004.com?ref=starprose…”
6 Comments
What a coincidence. I just got some referer spam, from the same company, on behalf of the Gephardt Campaign:
(Admittedly, this is slightly more bandwidth-friendly, using HTTP HEAD, rather than HTTP GET.)
The Democratic field is narrowing all the time…
I guess I may need to re-title (or sub-title) the post…”Desperate Dems turn to spam…
Ah well, The most annoying thing to me is to think that taxpayer dollars are helping to pay for this.
And here’s one for Carol Moseley Braun:
m002-01.bess.net – - [05/Jan/2004:14:46:55 -0600] “HEAD /distler/blog/ HTTP/1.0″
403 – “http://www.carolforpresident.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004″
This is *really* weird!
I’m beginning to think it must be some publicity stunt on the part of Starprose.
“Look,” they’re saying, “all the Democratic candidates are using our services. Maybe we can help *you* too!”
I was just looking at the refer logs, and saw that carolforpresident (of course through StarProse) was the referer right before you left the comment warning about it! Not even a full minute…
206.129.0.135 – - [05/Jan/2004:14:09:43 -0800] “HEAD /eclectic/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 0 “http://www.carolforpresident.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004″
golem.ph.utexas.edu – - [05/Jan/2004:14:10:36 -0800] “GET /eclectic/2004/01/03/joe-lieberman-sleeps-with-referrer-spammers HTTP/1.1″ 200 15229
I sure hope you are correct that this might just be a twisted unethical stunt on the part of the StarProse people’s part to increase their own marketability and drive traffic to their own site.
Their site has an, ahem, interesting, if not hypocritical essay about the problem of referer spam, and how it must be stopped. In the mean time it appears to be the main form of “advertising” and site traffic driving they employ.
Unsurprisingly they had a number of comments that were all highly critical of the company and the practice.
The question then is should I just block starprose and similar sites (such as paris-hilton-video related “blogs”) at the front door or just ignore them as what they are — a minor annoyance in the grand scheme, without significant toll on bandwidth or resources. Of course right now it’s a half dozen different “sites” doing this, but it will probably continue to grow…
Well, looks like you were right on the money…
Today riaa.com showed up as a “client” of theirs in the logs.
Ah, well, time to shut them out I think.
I got the riaa and kucinich in my log from starcrap. I think they would be worth blocking.