Referral spam is using automated tools to place fake hits on other people’s websites using your own website as the supposed referrer. The idea is to make it look like a lot of hits are coming from your website to another website, when there’s really not even a link at all.

Referral spam works as a blackhat SEO technique. Lots of people still run “Who links to me” scripts, and referral spam causes your website to show up on their website, thereby gaining you links. Additionally, many website’s stats are publicly visible, and even spiderable and indexed in the search engines. Your website showing up as a referrer there gets you still more links.

Plus, those webmasters will see the (fake) inbound traffic, and go to visit the page that’s supposedly linking to them (usually by clicking on the already-hyperlinked link in their stats program.)

That’s where traditional referral spam dies… the webmaster goes to the page and sees there’s really not a link to his site at all, and gets pissed off.

Going through my awstats today, I see a sudden large number of hits coming from the site http://www.myedconline.com/speciallinks

If you click that link, you’ll see there’s a link right back to me on that page Peter has removed the autolinking script. Good so far, right?

Now, go to that page directly in your browser, without clicking on the link. You’ll see there’s actually no link at all to me.

Hmm… what’s going on here?

Peter has a script there that reads where the inbound traffic is coming from, and dynamically writes a link on the page. So now, as Peter does his referral spam campaign, unsuspecting webmasters see traffic coming from that page. They click the already-hyperlinked link in their stats program, and lo-and-behold there’s a link!

At least some of those referral spammed webmasters will go ahead and add a link right back as thanks, and Peter’s site will increase in link popularity… real links going to his site, in exchange for fake links back.

Pretty slick if you ask me… An excellent example of identifying a flaw in a system (referral spam), and eliminating it to improve the end result.

Is Peter really an Evil Genius? Of course not. I’m relatively certain that Peter did not invent this himself. I’d guess he bought the script somewhere.

Peter - leave a comment and let us know where to get this script… I’m sure the blackhats who read my blog would love to get a copy.

For the whitehats who read my blog - you know what to look out for now. Never click your referred links directly in your stats program. Always copy and paste into a new browser window to see if the link is real, or if it’s a fake.