I've noticed some strange visitors in our referrer logs of late .... as if 250 people per day were clicking through from a link on www.nut-zu.com. Odd, and a bit worrying. On examining the log files, it appears that there must be thousands of links on that site - with many of their pages linked to ours. And yet ... visiting the site ... it looked just like some gambling site and the HTML source gave nothing away.

Thanks to the journal of Matthew McGlynn for solving the mystery for me.

It seems that the false references are being generated in the (unfounded) hope that my site displays web referrer information somewhere ... which will act as an advert for these people. Clumsy tool, and a bandwidth waster. I'm considering whether of not it's worth bothering with Matt's filtering suggestions, or whether I should start returning a "403" (forbidden) response to that domain - we could do that easily enough from any page because of our PHP infrastructure. But at the same time, I'm just a little concerned that I might not fully appreciate why / how these people are doing this.

The domain name quoted has been altered slightly to avoid giving these people any free automated publicity. I believe that the name I've actually quoted is unregistered
(written 2005-02-20 18:19:27)

Commentator	says ...
Bruce James:	Google bomb? If you have links to referrers, then the linked site gets a higher PageRank.. (Which I hope you don't ;-) b (comment added 2005-02-21 09:45:51)

G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility

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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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