Hello! For some reason for one of my sites I am getting weird and un-related entries in my traffic logs and stats. Referring sites include many of the pharma-spam and I'm getting 3 times the amount in drug-related keywords coming to the website ... it's a programming related website. Keywords such as phentermine, phenter, phen, adipex, blah blah blah ... adipex dot this, adipex dot that ... Anyone experience something similar? Any way of blocking or should I need to bother with it at all? thx!
Sounds like it might be referrer span. Do a Google search on referrer spam. I would attempt to explain it if I understood it. One way to fight referrer spam is to block spamming sites via your .htaccess file if you are running on an Apache server. Shannon
Thanks for that Shannon ... exactly what I was thinking ... I think I found some code ... # Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite1.com.*$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite2.com.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite3.com.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite4.com.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite5.com.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite6.com.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite7.com.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.*$ http://www.some-other-website.com [R,L] Code (markup): credit from here http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/referer_spam/