I really don’t have time for those complete and utter arseholes who abuse trust. In my narcissistic way I was going through my referer logs to find out who was linking to me and what they were saying about me, as I’m sure everyone does. Anyhow, I came across one URL that looked slightly out of place, claiming as it did to come from a php programming site…

So, I took a look. Strange… no mention of this site on the page anywhere. And then I took a look at what these bastards were selling. They were hawking a cunning tool, it looked for openly accessible logstats scripts and then made a connection to them whilst lying about the referring page so that the logs (and hence the stats pages) would have a link to the URL this script was ‘promoting'.

The theory goes that, because Google ranks pages according to the number of inbound links, this would increase your Google pagerank, and for commercial sites pagerank is all. For instance, my brother’s company specialises in selling Vintage Tyres and, for a while after they spruced up the website they got to the top of Google’s ranking when you searched for “Vintage Tyres”, and their hit rate (and the number of sales enquiries coming from the internet) shot up, until someone else topped the rankings for the same search.

Of course, the theory behind this tool is somewhat flawed, since the pagerank is based on the pagerank of the site doing the linking if that makes sense; 1000 links from low ranked sites are worth substantially less than a link from the front page of a popular site.

What the pondlife who sell this software are doing is attempting to spam Google. And they’re not even doing it that well, but idiots are presumably forking over more than $100 to use a tool whose express purpose is to make the web less useful for the rest of us. (And I know that there are buyers out there because I’ve seen said this tool’s fingerprints associated with another website in my logs).

In my last article I wrote about learning to trust people; to give the people you deal with on a day to day basis the benefit of the doubt. But bastards like these referer spammers are abusing trust on a massive scale. The software they peddle deliberately attempts to subvert tools that make the web that bit more useful. Because of this abuse of my trust, I’ve had to drop back into sysadmin mode, and I hate having to think like a sysadmin. Sure I can do it, I did it professionally for years, but I got out of it because to be any good you have to be paranoid, and maintaining the appropriate level of paranoia was doing me no good at all. I’ve had to password protect my stats page, tweak my robots.txt file and generally fiddle around with things to make this site less vulnerable to this particular abuse.

And I hate having to do it. I hate the fact that being a good net citizen means having to go through these paranoid hoops because their are malicious bastards and ignorant innocents out there who, in their greed are trying to turn the web into the cesspit that Usenet became, and who are trying to abuse Google and other search engines in the same way that the spammers are abusing email.

At YAPC::Europe this year I came as close as I’ve come in recent years to attempting to hit someone who was openly bragging about doing this sort of thing. I’m sure he knew that what he was doing was wrong, he just didn’t care. About the only thing that stopped me really losing it was remembering the old adage “Do not wrestle with pigs; you only get muddy and the pig enjoys it.”