Hi,
I have noticed in the stats of Wikipedia NL; http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/
... for several months traffic from strange websites, porn websites.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/usage_200311.html#TOPREFS
The send traffic to Wikipedia but i can not find a hyperlink to wikipedia on there website. I suppose the do this to get a higher google ranking?
This are the websites i c
On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 03:43:47PM +0100, Walter Vermeir wrote:
Hi,
I have noticed in the stats of Wikipedia NL; http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/
... for several months traffic from strange websites, porn websites.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/usage_200311.html#TOPREFS
The send traffic to Wikipedia but i can not find a hyperlink to wikipedia on there website. I suppose the do this to get a higher google ranking?
This are the websites i c
AFAIK, you only get a higher google ranking when others link to you, not when you link to others. So, go figure, unless it is causing a serious amount of resource wastage.
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.
/E23
Walter Vermeir walter-at-wikipedia.be |wikipedia| wrote:
Hi,
I have noticed in the stats of Wikipedia NL; http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/
... for several months traffic from strange websites, porn websites.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/stats/usage_200311.html#TOPREFS
The send traffic to Wikipedia but i can not find a hyperlink to wikipedia on there website. I suppose the do this to get a higher google ranking?
This are the websites i c _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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
E23 wrote:
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.
That might be, but it's hard to say for sure.
Let me see if I understand your theory...
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 had not occurred to me, but seems entirely possible. I should note that a few of the links I saw on that stats page are all happen to know, owned by the same company.
Another possibility is that some corporate firewall(s) somewhere redirect people to wikipedia when they try to look at naughty content.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
E23 wrote:
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.
That might be, but it's hard to say for sure.
Let me see if I understand your theory...
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 had not occurred to me, but seems entirely possible. I should note that a few of the links I saw on that stats page are all happen to know, owned by the same company.
That's right. It's called "referrer log spam". Googling will find lots of discussion of this phenomenon.
-- Neil
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 :)
"Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Another possibility is that some corporate firewall(s) somewhere redirect people to wikipedia when they try to look at naughty content.
Another possibility is a buggy model in certain browsers (notably IE5, AFAIR) which incorrectly places the current page you're looking at as the referer to ANY page you go to next, even if you typed it in, clicked on a bookmark, etc.
Even on my personal site, I can use my referrers list, look at most of the 'ones and twos', and can see exactly where my visitors have been surfing just before they typed in my site. This much is obvious, because I've often turned up at forum posts where one of my visitors has also been commenting :-)
Pete
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