Half of Swoogle’s hits are from referer log spammers
Tim Finin, 3:33pm 4 February 2006We are using bbclone to generate reports on Swoogle access. Look at today’s top 10 referers as of 3:00pm:
www.legaladvocate.net 246 26.14% www.myjavaserver.com 152 16.15% www.google.com 125 13.28% dannyayers.com 44 4.68% lucky7.to 34 3.61% ebiquity.umbc.edu 25 2.66% www.google.de 18 1.91% planetrdf.com 18 1.91% mail.google.com 18 1.91% groups.google.com 14 1.49%
One and five are clearly spam sites and two is suspicious, too. The first, for example, appears to be about poker, though the site name is legaladvocat. The site’s text is obviously automatically generated nonsense. All of the links point to subpages in the same domain with a similar structure and content. I assume that once the site achineves a high pageRank, it will be repurposed or sold.
So, it seems like nearly 50% of our hits are due to referer log spamming. I’d guess Swoogle was picked by finding its URL on recent posts found on a blog search engine or a ping server.
Related posts:
Ebiquity Blog
February 5th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Looking at myjavaserver.com I can see that they offer a platform on which peple can run java code. They seem to be a resource that many spammers use. sigh. it’s no wonder that most religons have some notion o of an ultimate reconning based on how you lived your life — heaven and hell, karma, reincarnation, …
February 5th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Today another referer log spammer has shown up — http://www.20six.co.uk/. Four of the top five referers are spammers.
February 7th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Someone suggested that it’s not referer log spamming. Last fall we had some problems with Swoogle 2005 in which spammers got onto a phpNuke based forum and filled with spam links. So maybe these hits are from those spammers checking to doors looking for the forum. could be.