Lately I was really puzzled by the stuff I am finding in my stats. Basically, it breaks down into 2 different things. 1. some-web-site/surf.php or /runner.php - that's the easiest one. Looks like there's a whole bunch of pay per ad view web sites and these referrals are the users that come from these services. Don't know what's the incentive for ad serving companies and/or their customers but these definitely skew my clients' perception of what kind of traffic they get to their web sites. 2. first-url,%20second-url (i.e. "url, url" as a referrer). These I don't get at all. Again, skews the perception of who comes from where. Overall, these two are quite annoying and disruptive, plus they add a lot of confusion for people who aren't really familiar with all the fraud schemes out there. Anyone knows what these are? I'm working on blocking these kinds of things anyway, but believe I better know what's going on.
They are bots. It's no biggie, bud. ... Get use to them. For possibly more of a description on them, do a search on those lines, or part of them.
I did a search on them, they aren't bots, they are actual URLs that serve some kind of advertising that people click to earn money.
Money is money man... If these people are driving away your clients, then take action. If there's no problems, then just deal with it.
My money has nothing to do with it. But if some of my clients are advertising and that's their money going down the drain then I am concerned. Especially that these people aren't buying anything, it's pure click fraud.
If they are actual urls, then why didn't you just go to those sites to see for yourself what they are?
If it's click fraud then just ban them... Otherwise, just put with it. I think you're over-reacting and not attempting to solve this. Actions speak louder than words my friend.
It sounds like you may be getting hits from user agents (bots) which engage in "referrer spoofing". Unless you can (not to suggest you should look at the pages the links point to) see how a visitor to the referring site could have found their way to you, more likely than not, the "referrer" in the web hit was artificially stuffed with the url(s) you are seeing. Some "spoofers" (so I'm told) will do so, to market their site to niche audiences - oe. webmasters who check their logs and follow up new sources of traffic. Others hope that their "footprint" in your logs may find their way to a backlink if your stats are public. As a general rule, do NOT use public (which show your web traffic/referrers) web stats services, and consider suspicious sources of traffic as sites you probably don't want to click through to.
Only "well-behaved" agents respect robots.txt - generally, agents which engage in spoofing headers are more likely to ignore robots.txt