Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Several hundred additional page views a day isn't going to make a big difference in bandwidth, as it's a fraction of my total page views. I'm more concerned about how Google views this.
I've searched the forum for anything related to referral spam and Google penalties, but haven't found anything relevant.
Any opinions or solid information about this is appreciated.
If it's really referrer spam, its intent is for it to show up in your web-published access logs so it creates backlinks to the other site. If you don't publish your access logs, there's nothing to worry about. If you do publish your access logs, stop.
If the requests have query strings, those might be RFI or SQL injection attacks, not referrer spam.
[edited by: SteveWh at 11:51 pm (utc) on Oct. 22, 2008]
One thing that does worry me, though, is that as soon as these spam attacks started, the number of Googlebot visits went up dramatically. The visits were back to normal today, but I wonder if the 4-fold increase over a few days was part of this.
If the logs are behind password protection, bots can't view them.
If you use Google Analytics, Google can see that you're getting referrals from those sites, but I doubt they care about that *at all*.
As long as you don't allow other sites to automatically use their referrer spam to "create" backlinks on your site to theirs, there's no worries.
The high number of Googlebot visits were most likely a coincidence. It does sometimes crawl in bursts.
purplesoda,
Some sites publish their website stats publicly. (I think it used to be more common than it is now.) Some stats programs automatically render URLs (such as in the "referer" field of the webstats reports) as hyperlinks. So if some robot accessed your site 10,000 times using another site as the referer, they'd be one of your "top visitors", and appear in your online stats report, and get a free backlink from you. Instant PageRank.
One indication in your logs would be zillions of identical requests. Another indication would be if you went to the page that is supposedly the referer and discover that there is in fact no link to your site on that page.
Tangor, I sure hope you're right about Google being confusing. Before this spam, I was getting 200-400 bot visits a day. That spiked to nearly 2,000 for a couple of days. Yesterday it was only 50.
