Referral spamming doesn't work

I'm sure Shawn and most other people would agree that the forums are not to teach, promote or assist people with referral spam.

This forum is a huge help to thousands of people, personally I would like to keep it that way, and encourage people to build a good website and promote it by all ethical ways possible.

 

I agree with you there Mate, not promoting ref spamming in any way just saying it works.

 

whispering-death is correct: Stating an opinion about something is not the same as endorsing it.

I think the majority of sex offenders will reoffend after release from custody. That doesn't mean I support or promote rape or child molesting.

I think that most politicians are liars and thieves. That doesn't mean I approve of them. I also think that in the world of politics shady unethical and sometimes immoral acts pay off. Again, that doesn't mean I approve of or promote those acts.

That said, whether I, Brian's "test" is conclusive or not, I'd like to believe he is right and I'd like to see more such negative findings - perhaps that would help to discourage the pathetic little pond scum that engage in the practice.

 

Thanks minstrel, I am glad to see my point.

Some dude just gave me a -ve rep with a message "nobody likes a spammer" rofl

 

one of friends had some luck with referal spamming, but mostly in yahoo

I have one of referal spam programs, but I havnt gotten around to creating an url list for it to spam

I could probably use snoppy class to harvest urls from google or one of the other engines, I think its pretty harmless, I jsut havn't gotten around to using it.

There also SEO benefit vs just click thur benefit, when I first saw I was getting referals from porno sites, I had to go check , you know to see if my link was there

 

Yeah. That's what the pixel-guys say too. The point is, did you stay? Did you buy anything?

 

nope i didn't

 

So it's not exactly useful traffic for them, is it?

 

I don't buy porn no matter how its advertised, I also don't buy beer, that doesn't mean that beer ads don't work.

Referal spammers and email spammers just play the averages , if only one person in a million buys from a spam, then you just need to send many millions of spams.

 

The footprint of awstats / webalizer etc is easy to read. If G or Y wanted to stop its SEO benefits, it wouldn't be hard to do.

Or the writers of awstats / webalizer could add rel=nofollow to all the links - easy enough.

 

Thats exactly right, even if 0.01% of the people who get spammed by email buy something, the spammer is making lot of money as they send out emails to millions.

 

But these guys are spamming webmasters using the webmasters' bandwidth. Who other than a moron is going to say, "Hey! This bastard just stole some of my bandwidth! I'm going to go to his website and kick his... wait a minute! I need one o' them! I think I'll BUY something!"...

 

come on, whats bandwidth cost like gig is like < .30 a month

 

You don't endorse it? What was the post above supposed to mean?

 

Are you intentionally missing the point?

The example provided earlier of finding referrer spam in web stats logs, clicking on a link out of curiosity, and then leaving the site without buying anything is supposed to show us that referrer spam works? How does that benefit the person doing the spamming?

The reason people do it is not necessarily because it actually gains the spammer anything but because the spammer believes it will somehow provide a valuable backlink for Google. This is the same reason that people go to the trouble of setting up three-way linking schemes (or indeed various other linking schemes) - not because it is necessary or provides benefit beyond other linking practices but because the players BELIEVE it provides some additional benefit.

And THAT is why tests and posts like the original one in this thread from I, Brian might have some value to the rest of us.

 

So you don't want to have an honest discussion, you just want to tell people referal spam doesn't work regardless wether it does or not, and maybe that will save the internets?

Obviously it does work in some from, otherwise people would waste their time doing it, just like email spam

 

You're STILL evidently missing the point.

See my previous post: if people BELIEVE it will work, they will do it whether or not it actually works. If there is evidence it DOES work that would be helpful and might even provide a hint as to how to kill the practice. But saying "it must work or people wouldn't do it" is just silly.

Does crossing the street when you see a black cat, or throwing salt over your shoulder actually bring you good luck or ward off bad luck? Lots of people do that, too... would you also say those practices must work or people wouldn't keep doing those things?

Not at all - that is not even close to the point. First, that article was written by I, Brian. I'm not him, he's not a family member or spouse, and I have no business connection with him or his articles or sites in any way. Second, I am not attempting to discourage discussion about the issue at all - my point is let's at least use a little logic and reason. I applaud I, Brian's small "test" in spite of its flaws - and I encourage you or anyone else to expand upon it. If indeed it is the case that referrer spam does NOT work, let's get the word out as much as possible and maybe the practice will at least decrease in frequency.

 

Yes there is evidence it works, I have seen it generate backlinks on peoples sites.

What would fix it is if everyone hid their stats from the engines, via robots.txt or .htacess, or whatever.

 

No offense intended, but beyond that bald statement would you care to share the evidence with the rest of us?

 

I would never post someones site as an example of anything,

want me to run referal spammer on one of your sites? give a text file with a list of urls that have their awstats exposed, we could count how many backlinks it generates?

Can't you just look at some of backlinks of people who are spamming your logs and see the backlinks they get from doing it?