Referer Spam Problem and Premium SEOSiteMap PlugIn

[sinclair]

I found this recommendation on Wikipedia:

"A simple solution to render this form of spamming ineffective is to prevent the search engine spiders from crawling the site logs by moving them to a non-public area such as a password-protected area, or configure the web statistics generator to use the rel=nofollow attribute on the referer links."

I am using Premium SEOSitemap Plug In. Does anyone know how or if this Plug In handles this?

Thanks

[emergingdzns]

Which SEO plugin is it? There are a few that do sitemaps.

I doubt though that either of the sitemaps will affect your stats area. The spam you are seeing in your stats has more to do with your main site being crawled by the spammers. They have a way of hitting your pages so many times so that their referrer url gets listed as a top referrer in your stats.

One of the best methods I have seen to combat this is to but in a robots.txt file that blocks robots, AND add some rules to a .htaccess file to block any of these referrers.

There are some other threads on the forums about this and some of them give some good options for preventing this type of abuse.

[sinclair]

Thanks for replying emergingdzns. Sorry I just now looked for any replies.

What I am trying to understand is whether these referrer spams are hurting the website in any way.

The only place these referrer spam links are shown are in the web statistics area for referrals in the SohoLaunch control panel.

The SEO plugin I use is the one called Search Engine Sitemaps by ViaStep.

I have looked at other post about adding some code to the .htaccess file, but I am not comfortable doing this.

In that post, Draknet says:

"Incidentally, this is called "referer spam". Unscrupulous web site owners spam log files in order to have their web sites listed on those referrer links, which creates an artificial boost in that site's popularity among those search engines that measure the number of links to a site. It also generates traffic when curious visitors of a victim site clicks the links displayed in the referrer listing if a site has one."

So does that mean if I don't have a "public" referrer listing, that then this referrer spam is not hurting my site, even though I realize it might be helping the spammer?

Thanks for any help on this.

[draknet]

From: http://www.coldforged.org/archives/2005/01/25/killing-referral-spam/
I am not taking credit and I didn't write this. :)

First, you must have access to your .htaccess file. Generally, this file will be at the root of your web server. Now, make certain that the following lines are in their somewhere, preferably toward the top.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

He's got a massive # of referrers here:
http://www.coldforged.org/source/view_source.php?s=htaccess.shtml

But in short, you're going to look at what he did and modify those rewrite commands to filter out and blow off what's hitting your site, if it bothers you.

[draknet]

I have looked at other post about adding some code to the .htaccess file, but I am not comfortable doing this.


Just saw this.

Um.

Why? :ehheh: