Surveillance 'bots
A remote correspondent (hi dad!) sends a clipping entitled Were Shadowy Figure in a Spooky Government Facility Perusuing My Weblog?. Independent (UK) columnist Chris Gulker described finding searches from a 'bot supposedly at "homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp" in his weblog referrer log and wondering what was going on. It turned out to be a "referrer spam" artist trawling for reverse hits. Not being much of a log user, I don't know whether this phenomenon is new or not. Anyone? What advertisers -- other than the usual suspects -- want to target the weblog-writing market anyway?
The article is now in a pay-per view archive so I won't link it. But its author's site has some cool stuff on 'bots (especially music industry ones looking for mp3s and so forth) and logs: "Heh, Web server access logs are the medium I read most often lately... they even have ads and spam in them..."
Userland blogs (among others) make their referer logs viewable to anyone on the web. And porn sites spam them creating the impression that there is traffic coming from their pages to the userland weblog. This creates an automatic link back to the porn page from the referer listing of the weblog. They do this because google scans that page too, and interprets those links as links from the site in question to the porn site. Since HTP has a lot of google juice, this rubs off on the porn sites.
This is a problem, obviously, but the googlebot is well behaved. Userland (and others) can easily keep these pages from being crawled, while still leaving them open to the public. I'd guess they would do this soon.
The only thing I've ever seen is in my logs was the raging cow incident.
So much effort just to get some google-juice action? (and what a lovely word google-juice is)... oh well!
I guess Gulker is interested in more malign 'bots like cyveillance and others of that ilk.
if your going to charge me for porn let me know the pass word at least
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A remote correspondent (hi dad!) sends a clipping entitled Were Shadowy Figure in a Spooky Government Facility Perusuing My Weblog?. Independent (UK) columnist Chris Gulker described finding searches from a 'bot supposedly at "homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp" in his weblog referrer log and wondering what was going on. It turned out to be a "referrer spam" artist trawling for reverse hits. Not being much of a log user, I don't know whether this phenomenon is new or not. Anyone? What advertisers -- other than the usual suspects -- want to target the weblog-writing market anyway?
The article is now in a pay-per view archive so I won't link it. But its author's site has some cool stuff on 'bots (especially music industry ones looking for mp3s and so forth) and logs: "Heh, Web server access logs are the medium I read most often lately... they even have ads and spam in them..."
- bruno 5-12-2003 1:02 am
Userland blogs (among others) make their referer logs viewable to anyone on the web. And porn sites spam them creating the impression that there is traffic coming from their pages to the userland weblog. This creates an automatic link back to the porn page from the referer listing of the weblog. They do this because google scans that page too, and interprets those links as links from the site in question to the porn site. Since HTP has a lot of google juice, this rubs off on the porn sites.
This is a problem, obviously, but the googlebot is well behaved. Userland (and others) can easily keep these pages from being crawled, while still leaving them open to the public. I'd guess they would do this soon.
The only thing I've ever seen is in my logs was the raging cow incident.
- jim 5-12-2003 1:49 am
So much effort just to get some google-juice action? (and what a lovely word google-juice is)... oh well!
I guess Gulker is interested in more malign 'bots like cyveillance and others of that ilk.
- bruno 5-12-2003 2:09 am
if your going to charge me for porn let me know the pass word at least
- iknow_45@yahoo.com 4-20-2004 12:40 pm
- iknow_45@yahoo.com 4-20-2004 12:41 pm
- anonymous (guest) 5-23-2004 2:05 am