2002 • July • 23

The Snake Oil wagon rolls through my referral logs

Okay, so I've seen my first spam via my referrers. Checked my referrers RSS feed this morning to see the following pages in the list:

http://www.voodoomachine.com/sexenhancer.html

http://www.voodoomachine.com/linkoftheweek.html<br /> http://www.voodoomachine.com/druglinks.html<br /> http://www.voodoomachine.com/awards.html

Not linking directly to these pages, out of some vague sense of "Don't encourage 'em." The pages don't really link to me either, of course, they're all just pointers to an ad-ware site for this AMAZING DEVICE that does everything from making sex feel better, helping you study, aiding in sleep... it even makes DRUGS better! Wow, this site is so amazingly derivative of the classic snake oil pitch, with a touch of the modern and dot-com-days (ie. Works with DRUGS! Click our FAQ link!). But I can still hear the wheels on the wagon squeaking as it trundles through town.

I'm just trying to imagine by what criteria they picked my site to spam - oh, that's right: there is no criteria. They don't even know who I am.

On one hand, I'm annoyed that whenever I get back around to working on referrers, I'll need to add a blacklist feature (shared / collaborative blacklists?). On the other hand, I'm annoyed at the owners of that site, and even more annoyed at the 0.01% or so of their targets who'll BUY NOW. And then, on another hand still (I have many hands in the blogosphere), I'm amused by the whole thing: it's almost self-parodying in these post-Cluetrain days.

Oh well, back to work...

shortname=ooobag

Archived Comments

Phil Ringnalda

2002-07-24T03:19:42

I can highly recommend doing a GET on any url you get as a referrer, and throwing it away if you don't find your url somewhere in the result. In fact, I thought I stole that idea from you, but I can't check, since the link to build_referer_db_pl.txt seems to be 404ed.
l.m.orchard

2002-07-24T12:51:35

Ack. I seem to have a lot of broken links since my site move and subsequent period of half-attention toward the site. Should be available again now. Though, I have yet to implement any investigative features into my referrer tracking yet.. I keep giving it lipservice but haven't gotten the round tuits to implement yet.
Adam Kalsey

2002-11-17T01:50:30

I just got spammed as well from these folks, as well as a porn site, both from the same IP address. I also got a bunch of referral spam with a Google search that returns a single result: one for voodoomachines.com. When I grepped through my referral logs looking for the IP address, I found a referrer for this page's Google cache. Since the cached page has a textad from my Textad Exchange, the cache hit showed up in my logfiles.