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Strange things are afoot in blogland.
Owners of the conversational websites known as weblogs have recently noticed that their referral logs have become the newest target for spam.
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them. So visitors to spammed blogs who explore the link lists also find those sites full of porn and sales pitches.
In most cases the link spam appears to have been added to logs by one of several companies that are selling a service they describe as "referral marketing."
Unsurprisingly, bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines.
Some search engines decide site ranking by factoring in the number of pages that link to a site. A site that's linked to heavily may appear among the first URLs returned in response to users searches.
But search rank improvement or not, bloggers want referral marketers to leave their logs alone.
"It's not just that they somehow sneak into my weblog, it's that they are hitting my site so hard. One day there were more than a thousand hits from one single porn site," complained Åsk Wäppling, known to bloggers as "Dabitch."
Wäppling runs Adland, a blog on advertising.
"I did not put that site up to serve as some tag-board for cybermarketeers," Wäppling said. "It really irks me."
When they first realized their referral logs were being spammed, most bloggers wondered what the point of such a seemingly limited spam campaign could be.
But as several posts on discussion site Metafilter pointed out, the real target may be those automatically updated link lists on some bloggers' sites.
"They're trying to jump-start a meme," blogger Jerry Kindall said. "Rather than mailing (an advertisement) directly to people, they're sending it to the sites where people go to get cool new links."
Kindall admitted he was sort of amused at first when he figured out that his referral log was being spammed.
"If you have a nefarious mind and no consideration for how the Web works socially, it is a fairly clever and original, if evil, idea."
But Kindall wasn't amused for long.
"I can see this becoming a real problem in the near term," he said. "You can request Web pages even faster than you can send e-mail spam, and it's not against any ISP's terms of service to request Web pages either. So it'd be really easy to hit a lot of sites with a lot of spam in their logs."
Most bloggers said the majority of their log spam came from pornography sites and from the referral marketing services.
Referral marketing services Mastodonte and Datashaping did not immediately reply to e-mails requesting comment, but Francois Lane of Mastodonte defended himself on Blogroots with a posted comment that read in part:
"I'll adapt or I'll discontinue. I'm not planning on becoming the major annoyance of the blogging world.... I'm not too worried my reputation. Marketing is all about being innovative, different, adaptive, taking risks and knowing how to use the technology. I'm trying to be all that."
But bloggers said that log spam is far more than just an annoyance.
"On top of the fact that this is obnoxious and intrusive, it completely destroys the entire point of a referral log," said August J. Pollak, cartoonist for the XQUZYPHYR and Overboard blog. "If hundreds of spammers start spamming logs, then people will eventually stop using logs."
"The referral spammers are essentially asking companies to pay them to build as many billboards on top of each other as possible until they all collapse under the weight," Pollak added. "They don't care about whatever they squish on the way down as long as we recall what ads were on the billboards."
