Ok, guys, I’m really p****d off.
This morning I noticed referral spam in my referrals on Webalizer, and on the referrals list on the right side of this page. This referral came after a suspicious email, that I replied to in order the verify authenticity. Here was the original email:
My name is Mark, and I’m the link manager
of http://mywebdreams.blogspot.com/ and http://iraqnewsonline.blogspot.com/.
I am writing to you to request a link exchange between our blogs.
Links to your blog will be placed on all blog’s pages above Archives inscription in the right column.
Our codes:
“”http://mywebdreams.blogspot.com Ilia Dreams Blog“”
“”http://iraqnewsonline.blogspot.com Iraq War Blog“”
—
Regards,
Mark Chermak mailto:mydiary@greatestphysicists.com
Now, you can tell why I was suspicious. This is not exactly a typical email I would receive asking to be added to my blogroll. So I did reply, asking where this person found me and why they wanted to add me. Maybe I was naieve to do so, but I felt I should verify.
Gavin,
I found your blog in google.com
and I want to link exchange with your blog – it’s very
informative(realy) blog.
Mark.
Both emails now appear to be automated. Though I could be wrong. I looked at the blogs. While they appear to be normal – they come across as somewhat false. I am not sure if they are legitimate, but again I could be wrong.
I became more suspicious when I received a second email, with the same subject line, and the same content, but a different blog.
Hello.
I want to offer an exchange links between your blog and my own blog.
My blog (URL ) : http://trolles.blogspot.com/
If you have agreed to exchange links with my blog, than post my link (HTML code) on your blog
My link (HTML code):
<"http://trolles.blogspot.com/">Troll’s Blog
So what to do? The spam is not chewing up bandwidth like previous spams, its not comment spam, its referral spam but, how does one stop it?
So far I’ve blocked the IP address of the spammer in a .htaccess file, and various subdomains just in case. This does not appear to have worked. Next step is beefing up my robots.txt file.
Has anyone got dodgy emails followed by dodgy referral spam?
Comments
2 responses to “Are the spammers creating bogus weblogs?”
I handle this problem by holding several email addresses. The email address listed on my blog does not go into an active email account. That kinda upsets some people with real contact on their minds but the real people seem to figure out how to send real email.
i got this exact same message & added the links before i got suspicious. the news portions appear to be automatically generated from a mainstream source; & the links are big on non-blogger staples like cigar & gambling pages…
m.