Talk about effective, subtle, targeted marketing. When email spamming becomes trite and mainstream, when guest book spamming isn’t getting the desired hits, when comment spamming becomes so last week, whatever are the spammers going to do? Why they’ll spam referral logs with spoofed referrers, of course! Either that or several Paris Hilton porn sites have suddenly developed a keen interest in linking to my webpage.
Sure, this may work for the first two links to show up in someone’s referrer logs: “Hey, someone linked to me, who is that?” Eventually though we’re going to catch on. Way back in the days of yore — like September — I’d excitedly scour my referral logs for sites linking to me. Now — unless the site happens to have an ordinary name instead of somehow incorporating Paris Hilton in the URL — I’ll write it off to referral spam and never click. I can understand preying on the elderly with email spam, and hitting the ordinary, Google-searching schmoes who wind up in MT comment sections, but referral logs? In my fevered thinking, people that care about reading their referral logs and have the capacity to view their referral logs and make sense of them are similarly not going to be continually fooled by this ruse. “Wow!!! Another Paris Hilton site linked to me!!! I’m FAMOOSE!”
Spammers of all manner are incorrigible asshats who should roast in fiery torment.
UPDATE: Those of you with .htaccess support can add the following to your .htaccess file to nip at least the Paris Hilton dildos:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*paris.*hilton.* RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Dan Says:December 16th, 2003 at 5:17 am
I thought those referers looked odd when I was browsing your online referral logs…
I naturally jumped to the most reasonable conclusion - you know, Occam’s Razor and all that. Clearly, I assumed that you must’ve played a brief, yet pivotal role in the development of Paris Hilton’s life that was only fully appreciated by people who wanted to sell videos of her having sex.
ColdForged Says:December 16th, 2003 at 5:32 am
This does appear to be staggeringly obvious on hindsight. Though for me to have played any sort of role with Ms. Hilton during my available, dating years would probably put her at about… mmm… 17 months of age. Surprisingly her demeanor wouldn’t be noticeably different between now and then — well, barring obvious… carnal tendencies — if her television appearances are representative. She might have mewled less back then, in fact.
pete Says:January 4th, 2004 at 2:57 am
Many people are seeing this Paris Hilton Referral Spam Issue. I’ve written a little piece that has some caught some attention.
http://www.whizspark.com/blog/20031214wsarchive.aspx#107193836775721919