E23 wrote:
I've looked in the logs, and there are many entries of this kind:
nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn - - [10/Nov/2003:05:06:31 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 18558 "http://one-specific-pornsite.net/..." "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT5.0)"
Almost every entry has different IP, and the specific sub page on the porn site varies as well. The requested page is always "/" and the user agent is always set exactly as above. There are never any accompanying requests for such things as images or style sheets.
This thing clearly is a robot used for the single purpose of getting just such links as on our stats page, to increase their google ranking.
If we blocked search engines such as Google from indexing the stats pages, using robots.txt, that would at least have the effect of making referrer-link spamming pointless.
-- Neil