On Monday 10 November 2003 18:52, Neil Harris wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Someone writes a robot to go around clicking on lots of websites with a referrer variable set to a site they are trying to promote. The purpose of this is specifically to get listed as a referrer on lots of stats pages, in the hopes that google thinks those stat pages are legitimate references, and so rates that original site higher.
That's right. It's called "referrer log spam". Googling will find lots of discussion of this phenomenon.
It obviously deserves an article :)