Rick's World

To all those reading my blog who've noticed some odd and very questionable links over on the right under "Recent Referers" and "Top Referers", I want to apologize for this. This is something out of my control that I've been fighting ever since I started this blog. It's refered to as Referer Spam.

Referer Spam is similar to the Spam email that everyone gets these days. What happens is that a person/organization who traffics in Spam discovers your blog through the various blog search engines. They then bombard your blog with hits with an invalid 'Referer' flag. The Referer flag is a piece of information sent from the browser to the web server whenever it requests a web page. The Referer is supposed to list the web site the person was browsing when they clicked on your link. In other words, its the web site that 'referred' them to your web site. The problem is that spammers have found a way to fake this information.

Normally this referrer information is something that most people who browse the web don't know anything about and never see. So why would spammers want to send spam over a system that noone sees? Because in the case of blogs, people do see it. It's common for blog engines, like the one I use for this blog to show the last several referers as links on the homepage. Idealy this is to let readers see who else is reading the blog. In reality, what happens is that these spam links are automatically placed on your home page. By having more links on web pages throughout the Internet, they increase their visibility, which increases their search engine rankings on sites such as Google and thereby makes them more money! Thesee scumbags are essentially altering someone else's web site without their permission to make money!

The blog engine I use has excellent support for fighting referer spam, but it's a difficult battle. The blog engine is designed to blog based on keywords in the referer, but since they keep changing the keywords, it's difficult to stop.

My apologies and please understand that I do not endorse any of the products or services in those links and I'm doing my best to get rid of them. Things like this are a sad reality of the Internet these days.