Web stats (Awstats) referrer spam

[Darren]

If in your web statistics (AWstats) you notice referrals from strange URLs, this is nothing to be worried about. This is what is known as referrer spam.

The intention of the spam is that if you happen to have publicly accessible web stats (through a link or similar that has otherwise been disseminated via the web) this means that google and other search engines can crawl the stats page. Because of the way AWstats lists referrers (i.e. with a hyperlink to the referring page) when/if Google crawls the stats page it will see that there are links to these other sites. The referrer spammer is therefore trying to get their site higher in the search engines by getting more inbound links in this way.

Just to re-iterate, so long as you do not publish the link to your web stats anywhere, the referrers are pretty harmless.

Referrer spam is pretty old hat these days and Google has caught on - webmasters can expect significant SEO penalties for being caught for using techniques like this. Furthermore, the links themselves are extremely low quality with very poor anchor text.