Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Fight Spam, but how?

Been inundated with spammy referrers in the last few months. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I know what it is - backlink spam [1, 2], which means those dirty ad networks generating fake clicks to blogs, to be displayed in the backlink/trackback list, which in turn adds to their PageRank on Google. So wily are these spammers that instead of using their direct URL they are now masking it through t.co and then further wrapping them into StumbleUpon or Facebook or [insert any respectable sounding name] redirects. The blog owners will both be confused and curious - "Gee, who could be linking to me from http://www.filmhill.com/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FUEmjqui3"

Sadly, even though I have turned my backlinks off through Blogger settings, these guys won't stop. The TLDs are too diverse to block out. But one common pattern observed among these links are that all use t.co to masquerade. Probably could insert a JS snippet to block any incomings of this nature. But I don't see how that solves anything - Google Analytics will still register the referral since the page is going to be accessed and its going to show up anyways.