Filtering referrer spam

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  onfollowingchrist · Member · Jan 12, 2011 at 3:14 pm

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  Askimet does a great job on comments. It would be a major plus to filter out the referrer spam as well. It is getting out of hand here.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  fencer · Member · Jan 13, 2011 at 6:22 am

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  I was looking for the latest on this too… It’s more of a constant irritation than anything, but still would like to see some effective measure taken.

  Regards

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  airodyssey · Member · Jan 13, 2011 at 12:34 pm

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  Hi. Regarding Akismet and spammy referrers, you may be interested in a staff response on the topic:
  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/whats-up-with-all-the-spammy-referrers?replies=27#post-509018

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  markel · Staff · Jan 13, 2011 at 2:39 pm

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  Keep reporting them and we will keep adding them to our tracking here.

  I know it can be frustrating for people who are seeing a lot of them (and it’s not everyone), but we really are working on it as hard as we can and have been for months now.

  Another thing to keep in mind is that these referrers are not being displayed in any way to your site readers.

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  theradiocrytic · Member · Jan 17, 2011 at 10:21 pm

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  @markel
  I’ll report a few of mine here in a minute. However, I’d like to know how they appear in our stats in the first place.

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  staff-blorbo · Staff · Jan 17, 2011 at 10:41 pm

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  bobdavcav, it’s just another form of automated spam.

  Referrers are as easy spoof as user-agents.

  Thousands of bots travel the web every day leaving nothing but spam comments, some also spoof their referrer for extra fun, and some bots are even dedicated to referrer spam.

  Some shady browser add-ons have also been known to spoof your referrer, so you could be leaving referrer spam yourself without even knowing.

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  thegentlemanstopcoat · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 9:06 pm

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  Is there anything that can be done to block them? Ive only recently started and today being my first day of what I thought was my blog catching on i found out it was referrer spam traffic.

  Any suggestions? Or where to report the URLs so that they are blocked?

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  timethief · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm

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  I’m sorry but there is nothing that we bloggers can do about these spam referrals. Please report them directly to Staff without clicking the links. http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/

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  timethief · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 9:14 pm

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  Blocking URLs is not effective at all. ISPs are placing gundreds of us in the same IP block to save money. So IP blocking can amount to blocking a whole whack of people in the same IP block rather than a single bad actor.

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  timethief · Member · Jan 21, 2011 at 4:46 pm

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  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/tons-of-hits-from-spam-domain?replies=25#post-548475

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  philstilwell · Member · Feb 21, 2011 at 7:46 am

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  The following report is from http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=

  Far to many of my referrers are malicious.
  I believe you could and should do more than you have been in this respect.

  —————————-
  Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for ow.ly

  What is the current listing status for ow.ly?

  This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

  What happened when Google visited this site?

  Of the 1079 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 16 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2011-02-20, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2011-02-20.

  Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including go.3322.org/.

  16 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including doiop.com/trista504/, doiop.com/sharyn542/, doiop.com/vivian605/.

  This site was hosted on 4 network(s) including AS16509 (AMAZON), AS14618 (AMAZON), AS39111 (ADSI).

  Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

  Over the past 90 days, ow.ly appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 1 site(s) including hogueras.org/.
  —————————

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  staff-blorbo · Staff · Feb 21, 2011 at 6:11 pm

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  And that’s exactly why we recommend not visiting suspicious referrers.

  If you find a referrer that we’re not filtering, please contact us via support@wordpress.com