Over the last few months, I’ve been watching the amount of referrer spam coming out of Google groups rise.
I wonder what Google is going to do about these groups which were obviously created for the purposes of gaming the search engines or promoting affiliate programs and little else.
What truly irks me is that most clients won’t blacklist the google.com domain because, generally, it does send legitimate traffic. Plenty of webmasters still display their recent referrers in a neat little list in their sidebar, which helps drive traffic to the spam site. The blackhatters have discovered this and are going to town with it.
One can only hope that Google plugs this hole in their system rather quickly. In the meantime, I’m tweaking my referrer blacklist to include groups.google.com — some legit groups will probably be nuked in the process, but I’m rather tired of once again being inundated by porn, pills, and poker in my referrer stats.
Yes, this is a big problem. I have lately noticed shabby traffic coming from Epinions.com groups. It was a shock to find this “family orientated” site plagued with dirty things
I have previously contacted both Epinions and Google Groups admins but they seem to ignore my messages. Mr Brown is talking about Internet censorship here in Britain - I think he is right. Something needs to be done.
# June 25th, 2008