101 Articles Fake Referral Spam
FAKE REFERRAL SPAM
Computer Surveillance is an act that every company ought to undertake in order to protect their data. Today our world is entirely connected with the help of network and we heavily depend upon it for our survival. The net has its own pros and cons where spamming and hacking has been one of the biggest concerns dealt by several organizations. The officials are still striving hard to get rid of the entire system that disrupts and incorporates corruption. In the process they have financed a lot for installing intense security for their data and statistics. However, spamming isn't still impossible.
Fake referral spam:
Referral spam is nothing but the art of getting a link from a site that lists out the most recent referrers. This could be in the form of an advertisement in your website or in AWStat/Webalizer stat page.
Webalizer is a popular software tool which displays referral logs. There are other similar software's and web related tools. Spammers use sophisticated software to spam your referral logs. Many websites use public referral logs and they are not password protected. Also they will be connected somewhere on the site for the crawlers to access those pages. Because they are linked sometimes from prominent pages, it results in these pages getting better PageRank. Spammers use this exploit to get backlink from those pages because the referral logs automatically registers every new visitor to the site.
For .edu and .gov links:
We know a back link from quality edu and gov sites matters. A link from referral logs of these sites matter too.
Reasons behind why people engage in referral spam:
There are mainly 2 huge reasons why many website owners engage in referral spamming.
Initially it is all about creating an affiliate link. When people view your site, they have tendencies to look into these affiliated sites. And if they end up getting interested in what they view, obviously the business is generated for your affiliate's link. Mostly you will end up finding referral spam that is related to your own products and services. Thus you will lose business under such a scenario.
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Another reason is to build backlinks and increase a website's PageRank. PageRank factor is a very crucial factor for every website and it influences search engines a lot. If a website has a good PageRank it means obviously it has got more hits than other similar websites and thus it becomes quite popular. This often is performed in the form of log spamming. If your website stats are available on a publically viewable page, you become a target for referral spamming. Some of the Stat pages have PageRank value and a back link to such a site influences the search engine rankings. The only solution for this problem is to protect your stats with a password so that it doesn't end up being listed in a publically viewable page making you into a beneficial target.
Consequences of such an influence:
It is more like an advertisement for the referral company's website. The whole concept is based on hoping that your clients may refer your referral logs and they end up being interested in their services or products. The spammer eventually ends up earning revenue.
Also it is done for establishing back links and improving a website's page rank which increases their revenue at the cost of your hard work and expense.
The thing is every website owner pays some amount every month for bandwidth allocation. They are also restricted by some of the limitations set by their hosting company. So for the amount you end up paying a certain figure of bandwidth is allocated for you for the entire month. If you are a victim of referral spam and your affiliate's link generates more revenue for them, your allocated bandwidth is most likely to expire sooner than the expected. For every bandwidth allocated for your website from then onwards you end up paying extra depending upon the package you have chosen.
In short, web owners end up paying more than what they should, it also slows down their page loading time which results in losing visitors and potential customers.
Also the affiliate link's ranking in search engine rankings will rise above yours in process. Another major issue is your site might get penalized if you have public stats pages with porn or illegal links to gambling or other negative sites. You never want your log or stat files to be crawled to search engines right? Better use folder password protection by moving your stat files into a folder.
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The above statistical data shows that the fake referrer spam was recorded the highest in the month of August in the year 2007, after which this manipulation tactic is observed to be declining.
The above image shows that fake referrer spam is nil in April 2013, which is just partial data, but it is observed that this manipulation tactic is not used anymore by spammers.
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |