World of *Nix

As i was checking WassUp stats of my blog, suddenly i found that my blog got 71 visits from some external sites (referrer) in last 24 hours. First my felling was “WOW, so may referrer”.

referrer spam

Later after i check some of those referring sites, i found these are just some sites, that using my site to get better position in site ranking. It’s call “referrer spam”. From wikipedia:

Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing[1]) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise.[2] Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer’s site improved search engine ranking due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use.

Though these visits will not loss you any thing, but it will just waste your server resource. And also if you show some stats on your site like referrer, then your visitors will get some wrong links.

Ok lets see how we can stop them. I searched on net, but didn’t got any good solution. So here is my solution.

Just add these lines to your .htaccess file and smile.

Order Allow,Deny
Deny from 195.54.42.56
Deny from 89.149.244.217
Deny from 78.137.7.99
Deny from 94.142.134.155
Allow from all

Here i use ip to block/stop this abuse, because after some research i fount this is happening from just particular ips, means those ips running some scripts to do this. Its semi manual way (still looking for better way). Just get these ips from your access log or any 3rd party plugins or apps. then add “Deny from newip” before Allow from all .

That’s all . If you know any better option please share with us.