Referrer spam (also known as referral spam, log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.[1] Sites that publish their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site. These links will be indexed by search engines as they crawl the access logs, improving the spammer's search engine ranking.[2]
At least since 2014, a new variation of this form of spam occurs on Google Analytics. 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. When it is the case that the spammer has never visited the affected site, the fake visits are also called Ghost Spam.[2]
^Pollitt, Michael (2005-08-24). "Moral maze". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2014-09-19. Retrieved 2022-10-06.
^ ab"Referral spam: attack patterns and countermeasures". IONOS Digital Guide. Retrieved 2023-05-14.
Referrerspam (also known as referralspam, log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves...
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address given as the referrer, that message or Internet address then appears in the referrer log of those sites that have referrer logs. Since some Web...
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the links. If the referred-to site does not validate the referring site URL, it may be subject to referrerspam (due to forged referrer headers) and may...
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threats including academic web archiving, comment spam, fake registrations, malicious bots, referrerspam, and site scraping. Incapsula also has a content...
administration interface should be restricted with login/password. Blocking referrerspam have been added but as it is based on a blacklist, the file must be...
enforced by checking the referrer header of the HTTP request. This referrer header, however, can be changed (known as "referrer spoofing" or "Ref-tar spoofing")...
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affiliate.com. His companies were major senders of Email spam and he was at one time referred to as the 'Spam King', as at one point his company was sending some...
protocol Referer, identifies the address of the webpage of the resource which links to it Search engine optimization Sping, short for "spam ping" "What...
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