No More Suspect Traffic

Andrew — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 03:31:57 +0000

I’m fed up with the entire cornucopia of suspect tinned meat products that float amongst the web. I leave comments open on all my old posts to encourage further discussion in the future; whether this will remain is in serious jeopardy. While there are many effective ways of lessening comment spam, referrer spam is another beast entirely — an insidious, pointless resource hog that baffles me by its mere existence. Do they really think webmasters are going to buy SEO tools from spammers?

As a result, I have added some severe ReWrite rules to .htaccess in an attempt to stem the tides. I’ve blocked anything remotely suspicious, including all localhost IP’s (my log files reveal someone is developing locally using one of my CSS files… you idiot); any odd referrers that reside behind 403 Authorization or are ‘vacant’ but return suspicious whois queries.

One tool that I found very useful whilst testing these changes is wannaBrowser, which fakes HTTP user agent strings and referrers.

If I have any reason to believe that I’m blocking legitimate users with these measures I will change the redirection to a page that allows you to contact me and say that you feel hard done by. Otherwise I’ll just leave them in limbo and not waste another precious kilobyte on all this suspect traffic.

Left Justified » spam

No More Suspect Traffic