I shall call it, “Referral Spam”.

Every now and then, I check out my statistics, just to see if I’m popular (I’m not), and find out how people find my site. And occasionally, who’s stealing my images. I like to look at the list of referring sites and click on them to see how, where, and why people are linking to me or my stuff. Most of them are search engines and whois pings. Which is weird, if you ask me. Anyway, today I went in there and went through the list, and there were a ton of random sites, and when I clicked, I couldn’t find the links or images anywhere. I’ve decided that they somehow sent false referrals to me in numbers great enough to be on my list (it doesn’t take much to be in the top 20 of my list), just so that I would see it and click it. I don’t know if that counts as spam, but driving traffic to your site in any a way that may be considered deceitful is spam in my book.

Odd stuff.

[update]: Actually, it does seem to be pretty common. But my referral logs are not crawler-friendly, so the stupid spammers won’t get any search engine rankings from me. Ha ha ha! Idiots.