Is this some new advertising technique?

[EthicalDesign]

I've just been looking through the logs for one of my clients sites (I keep an eye on his stats for him from time to time to see how he's doing), and I was looking for new places that have linked to him showing up in the referrers.

I spot a new link to his site from http://www.ga*****.com/ [removed so I don't advertise them here], so I think 'oh great somone new has linked to him'. I click the link to have a look at the site and I'm instantly redirected to a porn site.

This site that's showing up in his referrers log doesn't have anything on it, never mind a link to his site. Just a redirect to some porn index.

How has this ended up in his referrers logs. Is it someone doing this as a means of advertising (catch the inquisitive stats watcher as traffic)?

His site sells rocking horses btw, so not at all related to porn or anything of the sort.

Has anyone else had this happen or know why it happens?

[blue27]

It could be a result of one of these new sleazy softwares that automatically get links from other sites to increase you search engine ranking.

http://www.links-creator.com/ is one of many.
They all should be shut down in my opinion.

[EthicalDesign]

Thanks blue.

It seems like an odd strategy to spoof a link to your site though. My first guess was that they'd have some sort of crawler hitting as many sites as they could find and out of every few hundred sites there's probably be a couple where someone checked the stats and clicked through to see where the link came from. This seemed a bit far-fetched so you're probably right.

I'll see if he's been aproached by anyone at that domain asking for a link.

[Rincewind]

There is a technique that I read on another forum for selling to web hosts and in particular system admins. Create a site that links to lots and lots of other peoples web sites then use those links to visit those sites. When the webmasters and admins check their stats, they'll be curious and click the link from the refferer to see who's linking to them. A simple redirect form the links page to your sales page completes the effect. When I read it last, the suggestion was that it could be used to sell SEO and similar services rather than porn.

[EthicalDesign]

Yeah, that's what I first thought, but considering the number of return visitors they'd get it wouldn't seem worth it (on the otherhand I fell for it so perhaps it works better than I think)

You probably wouldn't even need a link page to do it, just a php script and a source of links for the redirects (parsing search engine results or something).

It's pretty scummy though however I look at it. Kind of stats spam or something springs to mind. If this technique becomes very popular it's going to start messing with people's stats analysis.

[Chicken]

Keith just turned me onto Silent Spamming (some of it I was aware of, but it has some good info), for forum owners...

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/articles.php?do=viewarticle&aid=684

If we got one of these, maybe you have one as well.

[EthicalDesign]

Thanks chicken.

I had a quick skim read through it and I can see the reasoning behind why they're doing it now particularly the boost in link popularity through open stats pages (this isn't the case on this site because I just use raw logs but definitely something I'll need to watch out for in the future).

I'm going to have a full read of it now.

[fac3less]

Erm - does that mean my signature is 'spamming' ;)

I don't offer any services, but I guess it ends up getting me PR in the end because a few forums point to my site.

Mind you - I could really care less about PR, finally found out last week (one of my sites has been up for years) that it has a PR of 3. I was like 'erm, cool, okay back to work'.

I've seen the silent spamming thing happen often - someone links up just to post a message about spam and then gone, not all of them are as harmful as 'incest links' or porn but they're all in it for themselves.