Anyway, so I thought I'd blog about a few things I've been doing to help stem the flow of useless refferals to my site. Now, in my last post on this, I explained that when I followed the referral sources back they all came to different domains (some were sub-domains of the same domain, actually) but all of them had a similar or identical message displayed--with no other content--this message was something like "account terminated due to misproper use... ACCOUNT TERMINATED."
Well, now I've started getting referrals from a fakey-portal site that actually claims it's "powered by Amazon." As though that means anything beyond "I have an Amazon search form on my page and any time you buy something through it I make money." I can never find a link to my site from the page (that has a handful of different domains but has the same bland "shop here" type of title at the top of it's page), yet the referrals keep coming. I did get an odd referral from some sort of advertising software site--I have no idea why they linked to me (I actually found my link at the bottom of their page asking people to clickthru and ask for a link trade--??) but I contacted them, asking them nicely to remove my link because I was concerned people might think I endorsed them. Shock-of-shocks, they did remove it.
OK, now onto my counter-measures. I think in my last post I mentioned that while I was getting buckets of referral spam, I wasn't getting any comment spam--this is due to using WordPress 1.2.2 and a plugin called Spam Stopgap. Damn thing has worked flawlessly since I activated it. However, this doesn't stop the spammers from wasting my bandwidth in the form of requesting data from my server. I have a feeling part of what slows my site down is the amount of traffic I get from spammers. (I know that's not the only thing slowing it down--I'm working on the other stuff, too.) Anyway, so to stop spammers from even accessing my site, I use something called an ".htaccess" file.
Alas, I am not technically-minded, so I'm sure Ann Elisabeth could explain it to you better. Basically what id does is set up rules for everything that goes on in a director. The "." at the front of it means it's a system file and some OSes won't see it on your HD (I know OSX won't) but most FTP programs will, so you can get at it that way and change the file name removing the "."
What goes in an .htaccess file?
Here's the first thing I have in mine:
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BOT NAME HERE" bad_bot
Next, I have this:
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*(DOMAIN MINUS EXTENSION).*" BadReferrer
At least, that's what I do and it does cut down on the referral spam. Unfortunately, this turns into a game of whack-a-mole, in that, every time a new spammer pops up, you have to add the new spammer to your .htaccess. There are other things that can go in your .htaccess file so if you already have one in your root directory, just add the above lines to it above whatever exists there already. It should all still work just fine. At least, it does for me.
There are supposedly better ways to block referral spam and I have tried some, but the .htaccess seems to be the most effective. (Most other methods I've tried have even spat back errors or stopped my site from being accessible.) Feel free to give other methods a try--if you find any that work, I'd appreciate it if you could post your success stories below. If you have trouble, feel free to comment as well--but don't expect me to be able to solve your problem--like I said, I'm not a tech-head. I'm a scifi writer/cartoonist/blogger--not a brainiac (obviously :\) but I'm happy to help. Plus, you might get some other readers who can advise you as well.
Anyway, I hope this all helps any fellow webmasters trying to stop these dickweeds from wasting your BW. Let me know how it goes!!
I tried the RewriteCond rules I wrote about earlier. Not sure yet which one stops the Bulgarians, but one of them does. If I'm to guess, I'd say it's the Symantec line. But I'm testing that out now, so I'll get back to that on my blog.
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