I've noticed, there's quite a few scripts that people run out there that show their referers. Some of these scripts even use hotlinks to do it that are crawled by google. I wouldn't do it myself, especially since I can't find enough to make it worth the trouble... and the principle seems very spammy to me. BUT couldn't one just GET pages from those sites with a referer you want a link to? Just curious if anyone here has tried that... heh.
I have thought about it a lot. What if you could send 150 visitors to another site, you could be listed on their "List of Referrers" page...that could potentially be cheaper than any other way of buying traffic...
Really you wouldn't have to direct people there. Just get enough of their pages with your referrer, the IP doesn't really matter, at least from the few I have looked it. Someone probably does this already and doesn't want to admit it... heh.
You're talking about referall log spamming, fine if you want to hack people of and lose your hosting account.
Yea, I said I wasn't planning on doing it. Just wondered if anyone had, or if anyone had tried it. I doubt you'd lose your hosting account. I could very easily get 100 pages from site with your URL listed as the referer. Doesn't mean you were part of it. It seems like a bad idea to put your log files out there for everyone to look at, or list top referers on your site... I guess I was just curious if anyone had done it, not a friendly thing to do, I know. =)
MattUK, I think you are confused, you would'nt have to "hack people" nor would it have anything to do with your hosting account. You would just add a link to your site until you soared to the top of their referral list, then remove the link.
I was using 'hack people off' as an expression to mean to annoy people, maybe you don't say that expression outside of the UK? I was refering to referral spamming when a webmaster sends 'fake' requests from their sites to other sites that publish a referral log. This can be done with a pretty simple to write script, capable of sending 1000's of requests at a time. This as well as 'hacking off' the owner of the other site may well generate complaints to the spammers hosting company who then would be obliged to take action. On the note of actually doing it I'm starting to think that google may have some kind of filter that is penalising sites that have an abnormal number of links from guestbooks and referer logs. I've previously been up against lots of spammers for some of my keywords, many of whom now have dropped off the face of the SERPS. I'm not saying it doesn't work at all anymore, I just wouldn't risk it myself.