Protect your site - server from the referer spam

A few days ago I had problem with some referer spammers.

I made a search in the G and the only tools I found are only "cut" those spammers from your statistics, but they still let them connect to your server, which in many cases produces server overhead.

So I created a tool of mine which is called aStatSpam, and you can find it here and I thought I sould share it with other webmasters.

I know that this thread is some kind of self promoting, but this tool is free and I will propably release it later under the GPL license so I thought it wouldn't be problem to introduce it here.

By the way as it has just released I would like to have some feedback on it, so if you have some time please evaluate it and let me know what you think of it.

Sounds interesting. How much does it cost?

It's absolutely free

Nice script, but I think that you should document it a little

Well I am about to do that when I have more time. By the way if there is anyone out there who likes to contribute it would be highly appreciated :)

could you explain what referrer spam is? :)

Well as my english is too bad you may visit the wikipedia explanation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam

Referer spam is a new and really popular technique. The spammer creates a program which is sending fake requests to your site just like a browser. Those requests contain a referer url header which indicates from where the user clicked on a link to visit your site.

The reason for doing this is SEO. As many statistics pages are indexed by search engines those fake visits counts as links and those sites are having high link popularity.

The fact is that this way of spamming is the only legal right now and almost untraceable. That's why I created this program because each single month I get more than 2000 fake visits to my sites and the spammers in many cases are creating a big overhead to my server.

A new version of the script just released. For those who are interested visit the download page here :

http://www.thetopsites.net/referer_spam/index.php?trg=download

v 0.92 is better. I think it looks more pro now.

Thanks for the explaination, Nikolas. Does this mean if you do not publicize your referral stats, you won't be a victim of referral spam?

No their attacks are blind. So it doesn't matter at all

I see! So aStatSpam blacklists the ip addresses of these spammers? Or is there more to it?

Off-topic: I don't think your english is bad at all.

In the current version is redirecting visitors to microsoft. This way the hit will not be counted.

Later I will make it deny acess to the spammers.