Marketing Defined

How to Stop Illegal Referer Spam corrupting Web Statistics

Are your web statistics being corrupted by illegal Referrer Spam from adult or websites containing Porn, Casino and Mortgage information — and apart from the drain on costly server resources, are you concerned the Search Engines will penalise you for this association?

It seems spammers have found yet another avenue to annoy and exploit us law-abiding citizens. Well I’m here to show you how you can stop these spam sites from showing up in your web statistics.

A short explanation of this annoying pratice is: unscrupulous site owners, in an attempt to have their sites show up better in search engines, and to drive any traffic to their sites, will set servers up to automatically access your website a number of times with fake referrer information that lists their own website.

When this happens the web logs of the target site can contain hundreds, or thousands of fake log entires.

To combat this, firstly, you do require access to your domain’s File Manager and .htaccess file to create a blacklist of such spam websites. Unfortunately, for those of you with a free service on Blogspot — these instructions will not apply to you.

[NOTE: It is highly recommended at the very least to host a Blogger based blog on your own domain. Firstly to allow you to benefit from your honest SEO effort, and have all-important daily access to your domain's web traffic statistics... the rest of the benefits will be the subject of an entire new post!!]

Exact Code and known list of SPAM web sites, to include in .htaccess file to stop Referrer Spam:

I have set up the exact instructions and code on how to do this, together with a good “start” list of known Spam websites on our main domain at:

How to Stop Illegal Referer Spam - List of websites to Ban

Please do not attempt to do any alterations, unless you are comfortable with editing your .htaccess file, and in all cases, do first make a back up of the .htaccess file in Notebook or a simple text editor - to fall back on if you make any mistakes.

The website Spyware Info has an excellent article on “How to Combat Referer Spam” but have since removed the list of known SPAM web sites included in the article. Here is the article if you need any further information on the subject.
Combat Referer spam at Spyware Info.

I am happy to report the above inclusions in the Marketing Defined - Increase Web Site Income Blog has made a huge difference to blocking out illegal Referrer Spam from corrupting our website statistics - I am certain it will help with your effort.

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