Referrer spam (also known as referral spam, log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of
spamdexing
Spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization, search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building ...
(
spamming
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or si ...
aimed at
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
s). The technique involves making repeated
web site
A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, ...
requests using a fake
referrer URL
A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...
to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.
Sites that publish their access logs, including referrer
statistic
A statistic (singular) or sample statistic is any quantity computed from values in a sample which is considered for a statistical purpose. Statistical purposes include estimating a population parameter, describing a sample, or evaluating a hypot ...
s, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site. These links will be
indexed by
search engines
Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.
By content/topic
Gene ...
as they crawl the access logs, improving the spammer's
search engine ranking.
At least since 2014, a new variation of this form of spam occurs on
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also mobile app traffic and events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in N ...
. Spammers send fake visits to Google Analytics, often without ever accessing the affected site. The technique is used to have the spammers' URLs appear in the site statistics, inducing the site owner to visit the spam URLs. If the spammer has never visited the affected site, the fake visits are also called ghost spam.
Mitigations
Techniques for mitigating referrer spam include blocking spam
crawlers and filtering out known spam domains in analytics software. The open-source analytics company
Matomo maintains a
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
crowdsourced
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
list of spam-associated domains which it uses in automatic filters.
See also
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Notes
External links
Referrer Spam Blacklistby Matomo – a public domain crowdsourced list of referrer spammers containing over 2250 domains as of May 2023.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Referrer Spam
Black hat search engine optimization