February 01, 2003

Advertising through the Referrer Logs

Not sure whether anyone else has spotted this, but there seems to be a subtle new form of techno-advertising doing the rounds at the moment.

My referrer log files contain several entries that seem to be purely "pull-in" links - ie URLs for commercial web pages that are most definitely not linking to my site at all, but which may vagually be of some interest to site administrators. I know all the usual news aggrigator referrer URLs, and this seems to be something totally different. I may be wrong, but it certainly looks to me like some smart bods are now using web spiders to deliberately placing bogus "referrer" requests on web sites - in the hope that they will show up in log analysis and generate click through from site admins inspecting the log reports for a website.

I am not going to name names, as that will only encourage them more!

I guess it's a smart way of targetting site administrators and webmasters, although it seems to go against the whole spirit of the web and referral URLs.
Posted by Jorgen Thelin at February 1, 2003 11:00 PM | TrackBack

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Comments
That's not why they are doing it. When sites list their referrer logs Google will spider that these sites have an extra link and they will get a higher ranking in Google..... Posted by: Skjold on June 27, 2003 07:55 PM
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