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Maybe I'm too late, but I'd love to get a word in here! Evolution is something that fascinates the heck out of me. And spam is evolving the way bacteria do when you take too much penicillin.
A lot of forums have software that publishes detailed statistics to the world, to show advertisers exactly what they're getting. With fancy Excel graphics and everything, but sometimes also with a list of the URLs that referred traffic. Those are usually hyperlinks for people's convenience who are reading the stats, so if you send that site traffic, you get a backlink. And if not, they might get you to either go to their site ( to find out why they're sending you traffic, but really to push up the hit counter ) or do a search for some bizarre keyword ( again, so you can figure out where you fit in, expecting you to click some results, and maybe even ads on them if the spammer is really lucky ).
People write software to pretend to be Safari and Opera on the Mac, and older versions of IE on the PC, and pretend to click links to your site that don't really exist. It's not really that hard to spoof the "user agent string" ( where the referral info lives ) and there's even a FireFox add-in that can do it whilst you surf.
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