Disney referral spamming?
by Sapphire (July 17, 2006)
When I checked my AwStats on one of my sites, I found 39 hits from “www.disney.com”. I knew better than to think Disney had stuck a link to my site on their front page. My next thought was that they’d circulated an internal email with a link, but I doubted it would show up quite that way. I checked the link, and it was redirecting to “go.com”, only the site was down for several hours. When it finally came back up, I found Disney’s homepage just sitting there without an outward bound link anywhere in view.
Then I remembered another month where I had exactly 39 hits from StumbledUpon.com, an alleged social bookmarking site whose link in your referral stats takes you to a page which says, basically, “Look how much traffic we’ve already sent you - wouldn’t you like to buy some more from us now?” Referral spam.
So I asked around about those 39 hits from Disney, and sure enough, found someone else who had nonsensical hits from Disney showing up in the logs. I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this?
If companies the size of Disney are going to resort to referral spamming our little sites, how sad is that? Unfortunately, the methods I’ve found for stopping it have the potential to block legitimate users from reaching your site.
Posted in Blogging, SEO, The BS Files
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August 24th, 2006 at 6:06 am
I have had hits from Disney on a few of my ref looks.
My initial thoughts were that it is a “poof of concept” for ref spamming that someone did on their own sites to check, but they have left the bot running and its going around the web getting others.
Ho hum. Eitherway I have no idea why they are showing up, I am not too bothered if they are not eating all my bandwidth