What kind of Spam is Refspam and how to Fight against it?
We all know what spam is. We meet it everywhere – in our mailboxes, cell phones, in ICQ, in twitter, in Digg, in MySpace, basically everywhere where there is a gathering of people or an audience. The spam is often used to advertise a product, to anti-advertise a competitor’s product, or for the “phishing” (we will address this in a different topic in the near future). Spam can be of many different kinds, from the “happiness” or a “help me in Africa” emails to the spam messages on blogs.
Website spammers have only one goal in mind – to receive as many links pointing back at them as possible in order to increase the search system ratings (PR or SERP), despite the fact that search engines change their algorithms all the time to fight spam.
Kinds of spam
Advertisement spam
Bulk emailing an audience of people with advertisement of a product or service. Usually this kind of spam exists on forums or guest books, social services, where there is an audience with the interest basis suitable for the advertisement. However, some spammers just don’t care and bulk email random email addresses.
Spam in the comments
Spam in the comments section with the link to their resource (website, blog, and so on). This sort of spam can especially exist in a poorly moderated or managed blogs. Not all spammers are dumb, and many have advanced to post “good” or “praising” comments like “great article, thanks!” or “super, this is exactly what I was looking for!”, and so on (you get the point).
Automatic blog submission
Automatically submitting the text in the directories, blog comment sections with the link back to the source. Usually the link is placed in a hidden spot or a symbol, like a dot for example.
Smilespam
Basically the same thing as spam in the comments or automatic blog submission, only here the link is hidden in the smile itself:)
Refspam (referrer spam, spam in the referrers, spam in the logs).
Automatic request to the site with the attachment of the prepared referrer. Link to the referrer, eventually, appears in the statistics logs of the site.
I will eventually talk about all specific ways of spamming in detail, but in this topic I would like to focus on the refspam.
Refspam or a log spam
The word refspam was formed quite a long time ago, when doorway boys were looking for any possible ways to add links back to their doorway sites to increase their PR and SERP positions.
Some statistics software like WebAlizer or WebStat show bunch of data gathered from the requests to the source (website, blog). Among this data presented, there is also a traffic sources: referrers, organized in the descending order (least quantity hits last). It usually looks something like this:
It’s not very hard to find sites with WebAlizer or the WebStat installed. All you need to do is enter the following request into the Google search engine box: “Usage Statistics for” site:com referer. More than 150,000 sites are vulnerable against refspam and the spammers know it and use it well.
When refspam actually happens the request to the site happens automatically pulling only a few kilobytes from your resource, or even not pulling any out, and only connecting to your site using the open connection function: fsockopen.
Ways to fight refspam
Despite the promises from the search systems such as Google that they are already not counting links from these resources, log spam is continuing to annoy site owners. In order to fight it, you need to:
1. First disable links pointing to the outside resources in the statistics software on your site.
2.You can also just disable the statistics from indexing using the robots.txt:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /webstat/
3.Close access to .htaccess for unidentified IP addresses or referrers:
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from 192.168.1.1/8
Deny from 192.172.0.1/16
Or deny access from IP using another approach:
RewriteEngine On
%{REMOTE_ADDR} ^192\.168\.0\.1$
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [F]
Or deny access via referrer:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} iaea\.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [F]
Webmasters good luck fighting the refspam – we can win!
Beck @ ProfitSEO.com
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