Referrer spamming: DAMN there's some angry webmasters out there...
 

I have a 'traffic experiment' site that I use for testing new methods of traffic generation ... especially 'black hat' methods.

Well I just decided to give the whole referral spamming technique a try, and I was surprised by how much traffic it brought in (REGARDLESS of PR affect, haven't been doing it long enough to see that), but at the same time I can't believe how much angry email I've gotten.

Will an ISP really shutdown your webserver for referral spamming like all these (pissed-off, too-much-time-on-their-hands) webmasters keep telling me?

What a joke.

-p

black hat as in evil.

explain more in detail.


refer spamming as in

for example lightspeedcash buys content say from adult.com for example you give trusted access to that refer. so people can access lightspeed? are you talking about refer=spoof?

more detail.

my explanation may be a little off, but referrer spamming is this: many sites, blogs, etc publicly list their referring URLs (the site the surfer was at that led him to the site in question). there are ways to spoof the referrer, through scripts, etc, so that it looks as if your site was the referring URL to hundreds of sites, blogs, etc.

you get tons of traffic from it as you get a hard link on the site, and you'll usually get your PR boosted too from all the backlinks.

i think black hat means something along the lines of frowned upon.

Exactly.

anymore insites into this?

thanks,

-p

Maybe I'm just a pussy, but I'm staying away from anything that smells like spam.

shit theres a ton of mainstream companies that do it, you would shit if you knew who.

Probably a good call.

From the angry emails i've gotten, seems sysadmins consider this shit just as bad as regular spamming ....

wtf, is being anal a pre-req to becoming a sysadmin?

-p

Spam is really good fried.

The sad thing about spam is there are a lot of other issues that the government should be taking care of first.

Sounds like you may have gone a little overboard. If you are discreet you should get very few if any complaints. Be selective. Only hit sites that are related to your sites theme/niche and no more than one hit per site per day.

That way you will get a boost from a few more backlinks without the refspam backlinks being the majority of your total backlinks which will get you banned sooner rather than later.

The traffic from the actual links isn't really anything of consequence as it will just be webmasters checking stats or surfers who just happened to spot your ref link, although if you stick to similarly themed sites some of these surfers may buy/join something on your site. :upsidedow

Die, fucking spammer, die!!!!!

:321GFY

:waaaaahh

good advice, stick with that...


blind bulk ref spamming is asking for trouble, and yes, those sysadmins are FREAKKKKKKS

Thanks for the tips, OZ!

I will have to re-evaluate my game-plan ;)

-p

My ISP has threatened to do so at one point as well. The problem is people say I'm getting link spam from your domain and an ISP see's the word spam and freaks out. They don't realize the difference really.

WG

thanks for the info wg.

-p