General Discussions

**ryangassxx** · 04-04-2007, 02:22 AM

I get like all kinds of referrals from sites that are all about drug prescriptions and online casinos. The weird part is that when I click them, I see NO links to my site or any others on the page.

What is going on?

Also, I've been getting like an insane amount of clicks on my sponsors banners. It's weird because I have more clicks on my ads than on my lead story. It;s almost like i have this weird stream of traffic coming from who knows where, and clicking on my ads.

I am really starting to lose my mind. Is there some sort of new spam tactic that I'm not aware of that these places benefit from sending referrals to my site, and/or clicking on my ads?

If someone could please explain this phenomenon I would really appreciate it.

**ForrestCroce** · 04-04-2007, 03:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ryangassxx

I am really starting to lose my mind. Is there some sort of new spam tactic that I'm not aware of that these places benefit from sending referrals to my site, and/or clicking on my ads?

Well ... you clicked the links in your referral logs. A lot of webmasters figure x% of their traffic will click an ad, so by spamming referral logs and hoping to get traffic from other webmasters wondering why this site is linking to them. They don't actually create a link, click it, then remove it; it would be pretty easy to write a program to fake the referral.

Also, some web sites publish their referral logs automatically, which would also get links to help the sites showing up there. Try putting /log or /logs after your domain and see whether your server does this.

I'm not sure why bots would start clicking your ads, unless someone is doing a general crawl and your ads are all standard links. Not likely, but possible.

Referral log spamming has actually been around for a while. I get plenty of it, too.