I wish people who don’t closely maintain their blogs would stop publishing lists of top referers (unfortunately we are stuck with this illiterate spelling of “referrer” in this context). These lists are often crammed full of referer spam, and help to provide the incentive for the idiots who do this kind of thing to carry on.

While I’ve almost completely stopped getting comment spam – partly, I think, due to closing comments on posts older than 2 weeks – I still get vast quantities of referer spam despite not publishing my logs. Referer spamming my site gets the spammer nothing; I can only assume that they spam massive numbers of sites knowing that a proportion will blindly go on publishing their logs thus hopefully adding to the spammers PageRank and at least getting them the odd click-through. (Comment spammers often also leave referer spam with their comments, just to add insult to injury, so perhaps the referer spam I see is the result of failed attempts to comment spam.)

Referer spam isn’t quite so annoying as comment spam, but it’s irritating none the less – on a fairly low traffic site like this one, legitimate referers get lost in amongst the crap from spammers, and like most people who maintain a website I like to know who is linking to me. Wading through spammed logs is just another chore I could do without – and I can think of lots of things I’d rather be doing than continually updating my blacklist.

So if you run a blog, and don’t have the time or expertise to prevent spam appearing in your referer list, please don’t publish one. You’ll be doing your little bit to help remove the incentive for this kind of thing.