4 ms·

Is Google Referrer Spamming Too Now?

27 points by stakent 17y ago

gte910h 17y ago
Sounds like an excellent way to check to see if people are presenting alternate content like expert-exchange always used to.
- angelbob 17y ago
  If so, that's a tough problem. Distrusting your 'users' (content providers) and double-checking them is likely to generate a fair bit of hostility, especially for a non-opt-in service.
  - mvandemar 17y ago
    To be fair to Google, they do get inundated with spammers, so a certain level of distrust is understandable. The problem is that like Pierre mentioned this is very easily gotten around, which makes it fairly ineffective, and to anyone who actually uses traffic logs for any kind of stats tracking, any fake referrers can be quite annoying.
    - mbreese 17y ago
      If they don't generate too much extra traffic, then I don't see any problem with spot-checking people. If it's a small amount of hits, then the faked referrer should just appear as noise. Now, if it's a lot of traffic, then you might have a problem, but the post showed something like 2 hits. 2 hits from a crawler does not a spammer make.
- pierrefar 17y ago
  No it's not. The IP addresses are Google's and thus easily targeted on the server for cloaking.
  - sern 17y ago
    Normal Googlebot IP addresses resolve to names like crawl-blah.googlebot.com. These ones don't. You could use whois to detect them, but it's a lot slower than DNS. I guess that Google expects the SEO guys not to be smart enough to use something like pwhois to quickly check that the IP's on a Google AS (likely).
    - pierrefar 17y ago
      My argument still stands: the hurdle for anyone serious about cloaking is easy to work around.
  - gte910h 17y ago
    There are some google ip addresses. Who knows how many google but registered in another company's name IP addresses they're doing this sort of thing from
- ohashi 17y ago
  That was my first thought too, and just because you notice this one doesn't mean they don't have more stealthy crawlers making sure you're playing fair.
nostrademons 17y ago
How do they know that it was actually a bot, and not an actual person inside Google surfing from within IE6? The logs show two hits about a minute and a half apart, which seems much more human-scale than bot-scale.

27 points by stakent 17y ago

Sounds like an excellent way to check to see if people are presenting alternate content like expert-exchange always used to.

angelbob 17y ago
If so, that's a tough problem. Distrusting your 'users' (content providers) and double-checking them is likely to generate a fair bit of hostility, especially for a non-opt-in service.
- mvandemar 17y ago
  To be fair to Google, they do get inundated with spammers, so a certain level of distrust is understandable. The problem is that like Pierre mentioned this is very easily gotten around, which makes it fairly ineffective, and to anyone who actually uses traffic logs for any kind of stats tracking, any fake referrers can be quite annoying.
  - mbreese 17y ago
    If they don't generate too much extra traffic, then I don't see any problem with spot-checking people. If it's a small amount of hits, then the faked referrer should just appear as noise. Now, if it's a lot of traffic, then you might have a problem, but the post showed something like 2 hits. 2 hits from a crawler does not a spammer make.
pierrefar 17y ago
No it's not. The IP addresses are Google's and thus easily targeted on the server for cloaking.
- sern 17y ago
  Normal Googlebot IP addresses resolve to names like crawl-blah.googlebot.com. These ones don't. You could use whois to detect them, but it's a lot slower than DNS. I guess that Google expects the SEO guys not to be smart enough to use something like pwhois to quickly check that the IP's on a Google AS (likely).
  - pierrefar 17y ago
    My argument still stands: the hurdle for anyone serious about cloaking is easy to work around.
- gte910h 17y ago
  There are some google ip addresses. Who knows how many google but registered in another company's name IP addresses they're doing this sort of thing from
ohashi 17y ago
That was my first thought too, and just because you notice this one doesn't mean they don't have more stealthy crawlers making sure you're playing fair.

nostrademons 17y ago

How do they know that it was actually a bot, and not an actual person inside Google surfing from within IE6? The logs show two hits about a minute and a half apart, which seems much more human-scale than bot-scale.