These guys sell a referrer spamming program.
Reffy is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer tool, which means that it will make a connection to a list of URLs with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics. Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries.
Reffy is extremely fast in operation because instead of actually downloading entire websites, it sends a customized HTTP header for which it receives a small response. On a modern computer with any kind of broadband, the average number of websites hit per second usually stabilize around 60 to 100.
Reffy has plenty of options and features, among other things an URL harvester which eases your job of collecting URLs to referral market to. The URL harvester just needs you to give it one or more URLs from which it can extract out URLs to the main list. Reffy also sports rotating User-Agents, proxies, and even referrers.
Reffy comes with a pre-generated list of 3047 active blog websites, and a good User-Agent list of real User-Agents taken from real statistics is also included.
This, ladies and gents, is a good reason NOT to run those referrer scripts. I wonder if we can all send them bills for the advertising on our sites?
And yes, I’m linking them. Maybe we can give them a nice instalanche or slashdotting or somesuch. Would serve the %&*(&#@#s right.
[update] Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam for wider exposure.
Don’t miss this part:
In other words, it uses the HTTP HEAD request. Trivial to work around; all you need to do is modify your program to check your HTTP_REQUEST_METHOD environment variable and not add the referrer to your stats if it’s anything but GET or POST.
Comment by Lewis Collard — 7 Dec, 2004 @ 00:40
Oh bollocks. For “request” in the above read “method". Pfft.
Comment by Lewis Collard — 7 Dec, 2004 @ 00:44
Only problem is that a couple of legit programs also use the head request to check for updates. And I do want the referrer on those. So I’ve got to find the exact header they use.
Or do what I’ve been doing and block the referrer.
Comment by Kathy K — 7 Dec, 2004 @ 05:16
Thanks for the comment on my blog Kathy, these buggers (and their user base) have been relentlessly spamming me for months. Will do them no good though, I’ve blacklisted them. Blacklisting only takes me a couple of clicks so its not a major inconvenience (other than the spiralling bandwidth usage).
I’m working on some code at the moment that should effectively stop them in their tracks. I’ve taken your .htaccess solutions on board too
Comment by Richard@Home — 7 Dec, 2004 @ 06:28