Log File Spamming

The stakes in business on the internet can be extremely high. For most web sites, the difference in traffic between being first on the listing and 21st is negligible. For your average webmaster it's not really that important, as they will get traffic.

Some industries are exceptionally competitive (especially those related gambling and adult themes). In these instances there are not a few hundred people searching for something - there are tens of thousands (or more) per day. In those industries, the difference between position one and two can be thousands of hits, and not being listed on the first page can cost millions.

The major search engine is, of course, Google. And Google is frantic for links to sites. The more "quality" links, the better. A single link from a high PR (page rank) site can mean more than a thousand links from thousands of low PR sites. But those thousands and thousands of links do a site do matter, and all of them can serve to raise ranking, even if only a single step.

So what do you do if you are a webmaster trying to get your site higher in the search engine results? Well, if you are honest you attempt to get some webmasters to exchange links with you. Preferably you work on a few, high quality and high-ranking sites, exchanging your link for theirs (and perhaps even lining some pockets with a little cash for the privilege of a link).

But what do you do when you simply MUST get links from high PR sites and the webmasters will not exchange links? Well, what do you do if you are not entirely picky or ethical?

One technique is called Log File Spamming. This spamming method relies upon the egos (or just poor security practices) of the webmaster of some sites.

You see, all webserver software has the ability to log every single hit to a site. Every image, page, text file, video or anything else that is retrieved from a web site has a line recorded in this log file. This allows a webmaster to determine how to better his site (and lots of other things as well).

Webmasters often create reports from this data using various products. Sometimes these reports are saved to the local machine, especially if they are run interactively. Often, though, these reports are run automatically to a special series of pages on the website itself. This is very convenient for the webmaster, as it means the reports are always ready for viewing at a moments notice.

Oftentimes you will find the website has a link of some kind to these reports. Sometimes these links are very tiny (just a few pixels in diameter) and in a non-obvious location. This makes it very convenient for a webmaster to view his reports. Sometimes the links are extremely obvious, even saying "check my stats" or some such thing.

Now, there really is no legitimate reason to publish these statistics for the world to see, except to say "look at the traffic I'm getting". In other words, it's an ego thing.

These publicly available statistics give search engine spammers their chance to add their links. They simply create a robot which visits the site over and over and over again. Tens, hundreds, thousands or even more times. 

You see, these reports summarize the top dozen or hundred referring URLs, along with the number of hits and some other information. In other words, the report automatically creates links to the top referring sites.

And this is why the robots visit so often - they want the referrer (which happens to contain the URL of the site that is to be boosted in rank. The purpose is to create enough hits to be sure the URL appears in the report, preferably near the top of the list.

Google follows the link from the website to the report and another link is credited to the spammers pages. If the referring page has a high page rank, then this can actually boost the spammer's site significantly in the search engine listings.

And even more ironically, the spammer may be doing this to his own competition. Using their own sites to boost the rankings of his site and push them lower in the search engine results.

The moral of the story? Secure your web site statistics. They are not to be shared with the world. If you do, you may find your site visited (hammered) by a little robot over and over and over. Your bandwidth (and your money) being used to help boost the ranking of a spammers site without your knowledge or agreement.