Scam link in "from"-links on my blog traffic

Question

I have a blog on blogspot (google), which is mostly visited by my friends and occasional wanderers on the internet. In the statistics I can see "reference-url"'s which are supposedly sites that link to my blog because people come from there before visiting the blog.

In these reference-url's, there's a lot of redirect-links. They look like a twitterpage or a whatever-page (many different sites) and always end in redirect.php?to=some-scam-site or some variation thereof. Always the same scamsite.

I don't visit the links and no-one else can see them (except perhaps some employees of google). My blog is also not a high traffic one, with less than 10 visitors per day. This makes me wonder what the point is.

Does anyone know where these redirect-links are coming from and if on purpose, what these persons are hoping to accomplish?

Answer 1

This is known as Referer spam, here is short description from Wikipedia:

Referrer spam (also known as referral spam, log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publish their access logs, including referer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site. These links will be indexed by search engines as they crawl the access logs, improving the spammer's search engine ranking. Except for polluting their statistics, the technique does not harm the affected sites.

It is possible to prevent them via .htaccess, WP plugins or by setting a filter in your Google Analytics. The .htaccess file will look something like this:

 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} traffic2money.com [NC,OR]

For making a filter in Google Analytics, check this article. And if someone is interesting in blacklist, read this.