Lead from Here: The Blog of Stephen Dauchert

In China the word spam is 垃圾邮件 (according to Google Translate). However, on my site Chinese spam looks like this:

The part you should notice is that this person was referred to this site from buyaccupril.info/TOPSITES. Clearly, buyaccupril.info does not have a link to StephenDauchert.com. This is called Referrer Spam.
The first paragraph of Wikipedia says:

Referrer spam is a kind of spamming aimed at search engines. The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

The problem is that I want to see how people are finding my site. Referring links are extremely valuable. When referring links get spammed it becomes difficult to filter the proper links.

Someone posted a solution (and explination) of this on Webmasters Share Commons. He says:

Most of these spammers are from China and Philippines. Sometimes I feel like blocking ranges of IP addresses from China and Philippines, however, I believe that’s a little too harsh for those who are on the good side of the picture.

He goes on to offer instruction to block the spammers for the webmasters-in-training (like me):

If you have a .htaccess file on the “root” of your website, then edit it. Otherwise, create a text file on your computer, upload it to your server and then rename it .htaccess.

Now that we know that you have a .htaccess file, look for the line that says:
order allow,deny

If you see it, then simply copy and paste what Michael Velch posted in his comment, below the order allow, deny line.

If you don’t see any order allow, deny in your .htaccess file, then simply go to the end of the file and paste this ..

order allow,deny
deny from buyaccupril.info
deny from blackhatbootcamp.com
deny from besome1.info
deny from unshinealley.info
deny from 60.217.248.153
deny from 125.60.243.52
deny from 202.108.50.69
deny from 123.125.156.135
deny from 125.60.243.52
deny from 123.125.156.143
deny from 123.125.156.131
deny from 123.125.156.142
deny from 202.108.50.75
deny from 200.25.218.249
deny from 64.186.132.32
allow from all

Save it and upload it to your server. Job done!

Tags: buyaccupril.info, referrer spam, spam, webmaster