Sounds like log spamming.

Could also be a competitor dropping links to your site into those crumby rings and networks in a feeble attempt to get your site in trouble.

Did you check to see if your site is actually listed on those pages?

Are they scrapers?

In a couple of them (there are about 6 that keep showing up), if I type in almost any search word nothing at all comes up. Totally blank page, which I thought was a bit.... odd...

I thought it might be from Google partners or something like that, but those are all turned off.

And a lot of the referral links have some "affiliate + numbers" in the URL, which I cannot figure out either.

The competitor thing is a possibility, but it seems to have no real effect except to add a little more spam to the logs. It is not like we are getting swarmed - maybe 100 or so hits a day. I just can't figure out why.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 10:52 am (utc) on Nov. 10, 2006]

I figured it out.

We still had about $45 left over in an old no longer used MIVA account that I decided to flush out the last remaining $$, once that ran out the junk referrals stopped.

Been sitting there for two years, now I recall why we never did anything more with MIVA...

LOL. That would certainly bring the kind of traffic you mentioned. Hehe.