Another day brought in another round of the odd referral spam to my Blogger statistics. Following the same pattern as the first batch, things took a turn toward the sinister once I started checking them out. If you receive any of these in your referrals, do not click on the links!
http: // art-cs . ru / ?p=275 linked to a post on a Russian blog, just like all during this onslaught of faked referrals. This one does have phone numbers in one post, though I didn’t look them up. Last post was in September of 2012 and most of the posts were put up on one day.
The second of this wave was http: // etiketu . ru / ?m=20120907 which links to a blog about proper etiquette and how it helps in business. Like the farming site in the first wave, this one has an about page. Unlike that one, no name is associated with it. Instead a mission statement of promoting humanism and decency is present. This will turn out to be highly ironic.
It was last posted to in October of 2012.
A blog on roadway construction showed up under two different links: http: // playoffancy . ru / ?tag = dorozhnoe-stroitelstvo-vakansii and http: // playoffancy . ru / ?p = 110
The content looks scraped from other sources and the whole thing strikes me as artificial. Last post was again in October 2012, though this blog was active for a year.
Another blog related to transportation was the beginning of darker things being found in the spam. http: // drivemotorist . ru / ?tag = aljuminirovannoj-stali produces a post about how to buy the right muffler. The rest of the blog is filled with generic tips on driving and maintenance, but it is the main page that raised a red flag.
At the bottom next to the LiveInternet graphic is a link. That link leads to a pornographic site. This connection to porn added some support to a theory I was developing about why all these disparate blogs are being spammed out to blog runners. More on that at the end of this post.
http: // est-edu . ru / ?p=54 brings a return to harmless fare, in this case a rather pretty blog about food preservation and canning. The post is dated 2011 and of course the last one was made in late 2012.
I’ve always regarded Feng Shui with benign amusement and was not something I expected to see in the referral spam. But there it is, http: // fen-chooy . ru / ?p=34 featuring an eye wincing color scheme. Every single post was made in April of 2011.
Another blog with every post made in 2011 is http : // finworldhistory . ru / ?p=29
That link leads to a post about the development of capitalism in Ukraine, while the entire blog is about the history or world finance. All of it looks cribbed from textbooks or encyclopedias. All the posts were put up on the same day.
Last, but the most important, is a recipe blog that arrived as http: // foodprood . ru / ?tag=recept-prigotovlenija-zraz
Looks plain and innocent, doesn’t it? But if you go to the main page and scroll to the bottom, you’ll notice some poor layout shoving the LiveInternet graphic into the middle. Two links are found there in-between text.
The second one leads to an add for soup mix, so selling a product is involved. Shady it may be, but it is nothing compared to the product the first link is selling.
I won’t put a screenshot up of the other product, because the link is to a very slick website selling the services of prostitutes, complete with NSFW pictures of the women and their individual rates.
It was that link which solidified my growing suspicion that these blogs have been put up by organized crime. Why would I suspect that?
You have to understand a little about reputation farming and the Internet. Blogs and Facebook pages are often spammed to simply build their traffic up so that they can be sold to someone at a later date. With the stats recorded (hence all having LiveInternet on each site), those traffic statistics can be produced to demonstrate the site is already getting traffic and is established. Suckers, whether they be individuals or small businesses, will get talked into buying the site for serious cash.
To pull this off, you need to seed a lot of sites and maintain them for at least a year or two, which happens to be the lifespan of all these referral spam sites. Money and time is involved, but not a lot thanks to automated scripts and reuse of templates with minor variations. An individual can do this, but owning domains costs money to register and keep registered.
This suggests bigger pockets for something on this kind of scale. Since pornography and prostitution are controlled by organized crime in Russia, those links may have accidently been inserted by a coder in a hurry that got his cut and paste confused between projects.
So why would they spam this out to bloggers? What better potential customers than people trying to get their blog off the ground is what they’re thinking if I’ve guessed right. The temptation to take over an “established” blog with good traffic is something to factor in. That and if you are a small blog, the spam is going to show up a lot in your statistics. A bigger blog won’t even notice them.
All of this is just a theory, of course. But that’s what I think is going on with these recent waves of referrals hitting four times each. What a world we live in.
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