Thread: Strange links from porn sites

I noticed that AwStats for my most popular blog is reporting a large number of links from various subdomain pages within a couple of porn sites. When I visit those pages, there are no links to any other sites.

I suspect the porn site may be using cloaking and substituting my content for search engines or is up to some other black hat mischief. I checked a number of the porn site's cached pages in Google and don't see anything unusual, but something strange is happening.

Does anyone know what is going on here?

What can I do to stop this?

This BlackHat technique is known as "Referrer Spam" . They just send fake requests to your website with referrer as th domain they want to advertise. Most people who check their logs frequently fall prey for this and visit their sites. Some other people who display their logs on their sites also are involuntarily providing backlinks to them.

if you use Firefox. download this extension User Agent Switcher
and you can actually set the user agent to be a Google Bot. Thus you can check if the site uses cloaking techniques for search bots

Thanks for the info!

I also blocked the IP addresses for the porn sites. If an automated program is sending the requests, that should block it.

Originally Posted by Aziz

if you use Firefox. download this extension User Agent Switcher
and you can actually set the user agent to be a Google Bot. Thus you can check if the site uses cloaking techniques for search bots

THis is not about User-Agent cloaking. This is just referrer spam and hence this doesn't help at all. Though the knowledge of cloaking does help TopDogger


Regardingthe IP Blocking, that doesn't help anymore. The porn spammers are advanced. They sure will be using proxies. Hence blocking the domain and all its subdomains is the only method.

Originally Posted by luckymurari

Regardingthe IP Blocking, that doesn't help anymore. The porn spammers are advanced. They sure will be using proxies. Hence blocking the domain and all its subdomains is the only method.

I forgot about the referrer spam issue because I have not seen this from porn sites for several years.

The problem is that these porn sites are using a lot of subdomains. My stats are not visible to search engines, so the referrer spam won't benefit the spammers.

I will watch this one to see how sophisticated these guys are after I blocked the IPs. It will not do them any good, even if the spam links still get through. I've just never seen so many porn links before.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I forgot about the referrer spam issue because I have not seen this from porn sites for several years.

The problem is that these porn sites are using a lot of subdomains. My stats are not visible to search engines, so the referrer spam won't benefit the spammers.

I will watch this one to see how sophisticated these guys are after I blocked the IPs. It will not do them any good, even if the spam links still get through. I've just never seen so many porn links before.

NOw that the tools like PRStorm are out, they are not aiming at traffic from link backs. They are just aiming at traffic from the site-owners like you For 10 or so referrers they get 1 visitor. So, its actually profitable for them.

Originally Posted by luckymurari

NOw that the tools like PRStorm are out, they are not aiming at traffic from link backs. They are just aiming at traffic from the site-owners like you For 10 or so referrers they get 1 visitor. So, its actually profitable for them.

It's a good way to trick people into visiting sites which attempt to fill their PC's with malware...

I have hundreds of links from these porn sites with one of my sites.

I wonder how many site owners actually look at their site stats. I look at them because I live on the web, but probably less than 5% of my clients take any time at all to look at anything other than the number of visitors in their stats.