Porn sites appearing in my stats referrers

[QHF]

I have a question about something I found when checking AWSTATS from cPanel. Near the bottom is a section called Referrers with two headings:

1. Referring Search Engines and
2. Referring Sites

A porn site is listed under the Referring Sites heading and I'm not sure exactly what this means. I haven't received or seen any porn sites coming into our domain, so, can you tell me if this is something I should be concerned about?

QHF

[jmarcv]

It usually means they are linking to you (doubtful) or just hotlinking graphics (graphic thieves)
Not a biggie. Just normal operating procedure of the web.

[Matt]

Its one way some sites try to get you to visit their site. they artifically inflate your stats by calling a file on your site a few times and on low traffic sites usually 20-30 hits would make this referrer appear high or at the top on your referrer list, making them more visible. The spammers know that 99% of the sites out there have little or no traffic, and hit the site a few times to make sure they are high on the referrer list.

They assume you will click through to their site to see who is referring you.

Just another type of spam. You can block that site in .htaccess if it bugs you.

[QHF]

Thanks everyone for the information.

qhf

[Matt]

FYI here is how to do it from my rarely ever updated blog.

glog » Blog Archive » surf.php in your webstats? Get rid of referrer spam for good.

This article was made for some other type of referrer spam than porno, but this will do the exact same thing you are trying to do.

[bdominick]

I've dealt with this and other kinds of "referrer spam" quite a bit. Matt is 90% right. But I don't think the offending sites are trying so much to get webmasters to visit their sites themselves, since that's a pretty retail approach to garnering attention. Rather, they're trying to trigger server-side scripts that some sites (especially other porn sites) have that automatically create and display links to sites that send high referrals. That way search engines and your visitors will see the link, not just you. Either way, the stuff is really annoying (and depressing... just when you thought your site was becoming popular!)