Referer Spoofing & Referer Spam: Why is this on the incline?

I check my visitor logs daily via awstats, and every day I get more “referrer spoofed” websites. I can see maybe that this would get you a few extra hits a day, but I can’t imagine any great monetary gain from something like this.

One website had me going for a bit a few months ago, I’d continually see the same referring URL in my stats. So, I’d go to the page, view the source & wouldn’t find any links to my website. I even pasted the source code in wordpad to do a search in case I missed something. I finally caught on. . . needless to say.

Now I get hits from multiple spoofed referral websites daily, some sending me 30-50 hits a day without an actual link to my website. I don’t get the purpose. People that are tricked into visiting your website aren’t normally going to be good customers, and in most cases you’re not going to be getting someone that would actually be interested in your product anyway. I do see a new twist on it lately, though. I am getting actual clickbank affiliate links in my server logs as referring pages:

http://affiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net

It’s dumb, really. It is.

Maybe you think it’s a great marketing tactic, and maybe you think it’s something you’d want to try. I was annoyed initially & actually referer spoofed a few of these websites back. . . but then came to my senses & realized I was wasting my time. If you’re going to do this at least do it with tracking links so you can test the effectiveness of it.

Anyway, if you’d like to try out this marketing method there are a couple things you can do to spoof a referring URL. I don’t think this type of marketing (if that’s what you’d call it) is illegal or even unethical, though it feels too much like spam for me to take part in it. Plus I don’t think the response from it would be worth the time invested unless I automated it.

There’s this free software, quickspoof HTTP referer software that works with Windows & allows you to send a fake HTTP Referer of your choosing to a website of your choice. Is very easy to use, only a few inputs & hit a button.

For the slightly more technical person, this page shows you how to do it from your Windows computer and your command prompt. I’m sure there are many more ways out there to do this, and if you’re really into coding you could probably automate it, even using different proxy servers and maybe even spoofing your browser signature that is left when you visit a page.

If someone has found that referer spoofing is a good marketing tactic, feel free to let me know details.

If you’re looking to prevent referer spam, check out this page on wikipedia, it may help you out some.