Justin Mason posted a message to the ILUG complaining about referer spam on his blog. I replied with a few ideas, and hopefully we’ll get more ideas on that thread. Unfortunately I forgot to include a link to a useful feedster search on the matter but JM will see it here I’m sure.
- Load up the referering page. If it doesn’t load then ignore the referer (removes private pages on intranets). Check the page for a link to your site, and in particular, checl for the url the refering ‘browser’ visited. If it’s not there, then ignore the referer.
- Setup a moderation system and manually filter the referers.
- Only print a referer after they’ve refered more than a couple of visitors. (Only mildly effective however.)
- Dave Winer at Userland added a robots.txt to his referer log page. It stops
Google indexing that page. He then notified the world of what he did, and hopefully the spammers got the message.