Nilesh's Weblog

Referrer Rats

After all those email spams, pop-up, click-thru, pop-under campaigns, all those 468x160px banners, the <center>400x400px</center> screaming ads, those spamming rats have come out with two new innovative ways of marketing on the Net: Comment Spamming - Spamming a weblogger's post with unrelated comments more so for advertising or marketing. Examples: Waxy.org, Kiruba(Kribs, your archives, get them up!). And Referral Marketing - publicising your site thru referrer logs. And both these are targeted more towards webloggers than anyone else. That's the matter of concern. We already had the Weblogs.com directory spamming incident. And now this. Referrer logs are getting blasted with links to unknown urls. The poor weblogger tries to find out who visited his site by visiting the url, only to find a porn-site popup. Spammers are actually minting money out of this! Links - Wired article, Torrez.net, Blogdex, Blogroots, Kuro5hin . Little did I know earlier that all this was not for fun.

As Mo Margan has observed - "...you can always tell when a particular technological idea has taken hold by how it is abused". We have had email spamming, netbios spamming, weblog directory spamming, comment spamming and now referrer spamming. What next? trackback spamming? Oops, did I mention something? ;-)