Oscar Trelles

Referrer spamming: a new “marketing” practice?

About two weeks ago, Mario Klingemann over at quasimondo.com posted a warning against somebody trying tricks to appear as a referrer to his site. My traffic, I asume, is way smaller and maybe that is the reason I was able to detect this phenomenon happening here, in the statistics of this site. Basically, these people use some sort of automatic script to generate connections that your web server counts as visits coming through their sites; of course, they don’t have any links to your site. So, is this becoming a new practice in the realm of online marketing? I don’t know about Mario, but I found 4 of these ‘referrers’ in my statistics, one of them even attempting to appear in my top 10.
But, what is the purpose of doing this? Wouldn’t it be easier -and an honest way to get attention- sending an email to see if their information is useful? I won’t expose those who attempt to increase their traffic by means of yielding inaccurate statistical reports to unaware individuals, that would be giving them credit for their actions. Instead I will ignore it for now, but I reserve the right to take further actions in the event of continuance.