Success at blocking referral spam, and how to filter referral spam in AwStats
by Sapphire (August 6, 2007)
ETA: the “second method” I mention for blocking referral spammers may have caused my site some problems. Read about it here.
The second method I outlined for blocking referral spammers from your site seems to be working perfectly. No need to block IPs that might be spoofed or have decent visitors to send. Just a simple redirect, so your referral spammers can continue working their little fingers off… only to have your site come up as forbidden.
But in AwStats, I’m still left with several thousand hits from these turkeys, which makes it hard for me to see which sites are really sending me legit traffic this month. I know there’s an “exclude filter” above the “Links from an external page” section, but I’ve never gotten it to take more than one exclusion at a time. I’ve separated them with spaces, commas, both, etc. - no luck.
TotalChoiceForums to the rescue! The correct separator is the pipe “|” symbol. And you don’t need to enter a separate filter for every bad domain if some of them have words like “poker” in common. I’m using “ground-level.org|eos.net|manyways|insure|gamble|xoquote|guide|didweb|cardton” as my filter, and that kills all the referrers I’ve been getting.
Posted in SEO
Subscribe to the feed or email updates
