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May 30th, 2006 
QuadsZilla As it approaches the end of the month, I like to look at my top Search referral Terms. In May, these were the top Search Keyphrases referrals for SEO Black Hat :
myspace tools 261 4.8 %
netconcepts 140 2.6 %
black hat seo 105 1.9 %
seoblackhat 89 1.6 %
seo blackhat 82 1.5 %
horse sex 81 1.5 %
rssgm 79 1.4 %
blackhat seo 76 1.4 %
small penis 52 0.9 %
sex stories 47 0.8 %
Aside from the usual humorous suspects, I Noticed “netconcepts” coming in 2nd. That’s funny because before this post I never mentioned that word. Moreover, as of this writing, I’m not in the top 10 in MSN, Yahoo, or Google for this arcane term. So how did netconcepts get into my log? It seems like it was because of a new twist on the old trick of referral spam.
What is referral Spam?
Referral Spam is sending multiple requests to a website spoofing the header to make it look like you are sending real traffic to another site. This way, when someone checks their log, they will see 100 or 5,000 or however-many “referrals” from another site that actually sent them no real traffic. Often, you don’t even have a link to the target site from on page of the sending URL you are referral spamming from. By refferral spamming, you will get the clicks from the curious refferral log browsers as well as traffic from the toplists you dominate.
What is the Netconcepts Twist on Referral Spam?
In the case of Netconcepts, instead of putting netsoncepts.com or netconcepts.co.za as the rereferring URL in their referral spam, they appear to have put a search string that includes the search term netoconcepts in the header as the referring site. Something like:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=omittedcrap:en&q=netconcepts
It’s not a bad idea especially if you are number 1 for your brand in the SERPs. It’s a nice twist on an old trick. The downside is that it will not create any links directly to your site from toplists.
I may not have noticed it if I had EVER mentioned netconcepts before, but I didn’t. Although, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to actually rank for that term now that it looks like someone is already Search Keyphrases Refferal Spamming it.
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I’ve noticed something similar from these sites: technooffice dot com, go-went-gone dot com and anything from ygboih dot info. They show up in the referrer logs but obviously aren’t sending traffic. When I poked around a bit, it seems like there is another potential benefit to this scheme. On some blogs and web sites, there seems to be a script that publishes the latest referrers and the top referrers and links back to the referring domain with a basic, naked link. The first two domains appear to be doing something fishy with the overflow: hidden; attribute. The last one is packed with misspellings of key phrases. I wonder if any of these sites actually makes money.
“On some blogs and web sites, there seems to be a script that publishes the latest referrers and the top referrers and links back to the referring domain with a basic, naked link.”
That’s called a toplist.
Isn’t this methode somewhat useless? Unless you are spamming thousand of requests, you won’t see any results right? Additionally you have to wait if the admin is checking his logs and maybe is visiting your site once. I think this is too much work for nothing…
Actually, this method is usless unless you are spamming millions of requests. But that’s not very difficult to do with a script. Also, with toplists they don’t have to check anything, a link to your site is automatically put on their site.
[...] Another blog I follow regularly SEO Blackhat put up its own list of popular referrals for the month of May. He also documented a new type of spam going around. I haven’t had many problems with comment spam, either my blog is too small to bother about or the way I set things up has remained secure against spam for the most part. [...]
Is the objective of this spam to inflate the PR of this page: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=omittedcrap:en&q=netconcepts ?
Then indirectly the love will pass to the sites dominating that page?
If that’s the case there’s no way to know whether the spam came from netconcepts.com or .co.za right?
I would be pissing off my pants if I could confirm something about all this… but I probably should stfu ;-o
Yea, it´s from them but it was an accident. Someone from the company has offered to explain.
Can you confirm if the objective was to inflate the google results PR?
I dont get this: for example: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=seoblackhat&btnG=Search+Blogs is a PR8 but http://www.google.com/search?q=seoblackhat&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official carries no PR at all. I made this test with several combinations. Blogsearch seems to be do the job but traditional google search doesn’t.
Am I right? And if I am, then what’s the purpose of this ref spam?
The purpose of spamming or any SEO effort should not be to inflate page rank, but to improve SERPs or drive traffic. This method would not improve SERPs, but might drive traffic from referral log diggers.
Normal Referral spamming could improve SERPs especially in Yahoo and MSN.
By inflating PR aren’t you indirectly improving your serps? You need link popularity if you want to rank for anything, although the degree to which PR is influential is decreasingly important especially in G.
Anyways this triggered a question in my mind relating to this post ( http://seoblackhat.com/2005/09/26/inbound-link-authority-sites-exploit/ ) on link dumping where you mention briefly that you can get high authority link from Rojo and Google. But it’s blogsearch.google , not regular google search. Reading that I have to assume that you are saying that that results page in google blog search counts as a link to your blog from a highly trusted PR 8 page. If that’s the case, then all I need to do is rank for some nonsense term without competition and bam, I’ll have a link back to my blog. In fact the most nonsense the term is the more I’ll own all the space in that list and get all the links back to me.
But that doesn’t seem to work in google search because the result pages don’t carry PR love. Or do they?
It seems from my testing that some of these types of links pass love and some do not. If you have a few hundred of them, they definately count for something – but it’s hard to say which ones. I’m 99% sure that Google result pages pass no love in Google. They probably don’t count in MSN or Yahoo either, that was just an example.
But take, for example, technorati. I think think that a technorati page indexed in Yahoo passes some love in Yahoo. . . but I’m not 100% sure. But if you have a few thousand such links on similar sites, they will certainly count for something.
I reckon this is made to increase keyword research popularity on service like wordtracker… clean it up and filter your keywords list is a must..
I was responsible for the false hits against this site (and specifically the rss feeds). I was using a firefox extension call RefControl, it allows you to override the referrer firefox uses when making http requests.
I was testing some inbound link tracking, and had the RefControl extension overriding the referrer header on all requests. I left this on over the weekend – firefoxes rss reader kept hitting the rss file and QuadZilla’s logs filled with this referral spam.
I guess next time rather than using my companies name when I’m testing I should use something more sinister
Or maybe I should be careful which sites I (accidently) referrer spam.