website hits from Rumania

[roxytoo]

From my stats from one of my websites I am increasingly getting hits from some very dodgy websites! When I click on them (russian and rumanian) I can't see anything that will link me to them

What can I do?

[donafe]

Hi Roxytoo,

can you post a couple of entries from the http access log?

If you see them as "referrals/source of traffic" - that could be one the marketing things: they expect you to see their site in your logs and out of curiosity go to their site. That's one way to explain it.

I see it in my logs - mainly from Russia.

[roxytoo]

here they are, but how to they do that?

.wtracker.org 21 21
qseo.net 18 18
-power1.ru 15 15
.unrealtech.ru 14 14
botov.net.ua 12 12
xn--80axfdgdkc.xn--p1ai 11 11
- cinemella.ru 9 9
-tovary-online.ru 9 9
-space-ua.com 9 9
.whorush.com/search/ 8 8
\xf1\xef\xee\xf0\xf2\xec\xe0\xf2.\xf0\xf4 6 6

[donafe]

You just gave them some valuable backlinks from lmh

I can see some of these site in my logs too.

To do it is a very straightforward process:

1. Identify a target site (your site in this case)
2. Send a request with a spoofed “referer” header. This is how their site gets into your log files.

I don’t think there is any harm to your website other than they mess up all your stats. I suggest just to filter these sites out and regenerate the stats.

[roxytoo]

sorry, that was silly of me!!

[roxytoo]

not sure what you mean by this?
. Send a request with a spoofed “referer” header. This is how their site gets into your log files.

[donafe]

It’s a bit technical. But I’ll try to explain.

When a you click on a web link on a page – the browser generates an http request and sends it to the http server.

Here is an example request:

Code: Select all

GET /en/html/dummy.php?name=some_name HTTP/1.1
Host: target_site.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;en-GB; rv:1.8.0.11) 
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://bad_russian_site

All they have to do is to generate such a request. It doesn’t have to be done by a web browser as we use – it can be done by a bot. As long as the "Referer" header field points to their site - it would look like there was a link on their site and someone clicked on it.

Does it make sense?

[donafe]

I think this article covers it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam

[roxytoo]

Thanks for that, always wondered how that happened!

So do I just copy and paste the urls from the stats with a no follow on my robots.txt?

[paolo]

When posting the address of a dodgy site, please disable the link by leaving a space in it:
www. dodgysite.com

or remove everything up to the www. :
dodgysite.com

Otherwise they get a backlink from LMH and potentially LMH is penalised by Google.

[roxytoo]

I think I disabled them within 1 min of posting, are they ok now?

[donafe]

robots.txt has nothing to do with it.

What you probably want is to ignore these bots’ requests as they never existed when generating your website stats. This will depend entirely how your stats are generated.