Blog Spam

In recent days I've noticed some very strange referral URLs on my top referrals link list. A few sites who definitely have no links somehow appear to have sent me a noticeable amount of users. How is this possible you ask? Well, it seems someone had figured out that blogging software does not perform any validation on the referrals (such as check if the link in present on the sending site) and with trivial scripts generate fake hits that quite easily get said site to appear on the top referrals list. Blocking such things is quite difficult since the scammers fake genuine browser signatures and in some cases even setup dummy pages that have the link back to the original site. More over @ least one of those scammers seems to be using anonymous proxies to prevent IP filtering. Quite frankly outside of manual referral validation or a referral whitelist I see no fool proof way to prevent this from happening. Since I don't have the time or interest invest time into manual validation or creation of whitelists, I am going to turn off "Top Referrals" perhaps someone with more free time then I will implement a whitelist for this purpose.
As far as the reason why people are doing this, well beyond getting perhaps a click or two from curios visitors of my site it helps their rankings on search engines (Google) that determine search result position based on the number of links to a site. Given that those same search engines can be used to find sites displaying such link lists it becomes trivial to design a simple script (heh could be a PHP script) to get a list of victims and send them a bunch of referrals. Given the growing popularity of blogs it seems to be a fool proof way to get lot's of attention. More over it does not appear to violate any laws, so for now it's seems like spammers/scammers have found safe haven.