Sooooooo… it seems Paris Hilton does not admire my work after all. You know, I didn’t really think she did either. I wrote a few weeks ago that disassociated had apparently been receiving traffic from a weblog that has a very strong editorial bias towards a certain infamous video production of Ms Hilton’s.

My brother Ben informs me this is most likely referrer spam. The mind truly boggles. It makes you wonder what will be next. (We all know SMS spam is on the way…) What is the point of referrer spam in the first place though? What difference does it make that a website is listed on my referrer logs? How does that drive great quantities of traffic back to the spamming site?

That really depends on what type of website you have. Referrer spam at disassociated is little more than a nuisance, since it is invisible BUT, on some sites where a list of recent referrers is displayed, it can be a major problem.

Check out the referrers page at John Hoke’s website to see what I mean. A site spammer could potentially draw increased traffic to his (er, her) website if they were able to forge enough entries on a page like this.

Thankfully there are remedies. I am fortunate that disassociated is hosted on a UNIX web server, so I can simply hack my htaccess file to solve the problem. It works a treat so far. Ms Wannabegirl has another UNIX based suggestion as well.

While it is one thing for some silly porn video site to go infesting my referrer logs with referrer spam, it is quite another for commercial sites to try it on as well. It’s a little sleazy don’t you think?

I was quite amazed to find what I thought was a reputable company offering a variety of, shall we say, website promotion and validation services, playing the referrer spam game.

Just a little low, no? Are you not able to generate business leads a little more legitimately? Would you like to be named and shamed? If not, you know what to do…