Check out these recent entries in my Apache log files:

Both of these entries have a few interesting points. They are from the same ip address, which does not resolve to anything. They both report a user agent of "MSIE 6.0", which is not the actual user agent string of any version of IE. And they both point to fake blogs.

Neither of these sites has an actual link to my site. So the referrer strings are fake.

Looking up the domains reveals that both sites have a lot in common:

Domain Name: kwlablog.com Name Servers ns1.kwlablog.com 141.85.3.109 ns2.kwlablog.com 141.85.3.109 Domain Created: 11/8/2003 Domain Expires: 11/8/2004

Domain Name: jennifersblog.com Name Servers ns1.jennifersblog.com 141.85.3.106 ns2.jennifersblog.com 141.85.3.106 Domain Created: 11/8/2003 Domain Expires: 11/8/2004

But the sites have different names/addresses for Administrative, Billing, & Technical contacts.

Visiting the sites reveals that they have blog entries that are just links to news stories. And most of the other links on the sites (like the archives links) don't actually do anything.

What is the purpose of these fake blogs? And what is the purpose of scattering them around webserver logfiles in the form of referrer strings? Are these sites trying to take advantage of the recent trend to post referrer links within page content? Are they using this fact to try to boost their search engine pagerank by appearing in this generated page content?

I've found some blog entries on the referrer spamming I mention in the previous floppaganda post. You can find some good discussion at net warriors.org blog.

Check out these blog entries in particular: More Referrer Spamming, Referrer SPAM updates, Referrer Spamming, wrap up.