So, I have another website that I run, for a gaming clan, that is rather popular.  I keep an eye on the statistics for the site and apparently some “referrers” want to spam up my internal statistics page.  It is yet another annoyance the world throws me, but fortunately I found a way to hold the referrer spam at bay for now.

The gaming clan site at http://www.combatcorps.com/ is a high volume site and thus attracts search engine traffic and now spam referrers too.  Spammers are overall annoying and now I get to see a new level of annoying in my logs via referrer spam.

For my logging, I use Webalizer which comes with my hosting package.  While this known program can display statistics just fine, I have a “prettier” display for it called JawStats, a free program I found on the internet on day.  You should check it out sometime if you do statistics monitoring.  It was from there that I found out the problem with my referrers.

Fortunately, somebody wiser than I found a way to keep referrers at bay with .htaccess and was kind enough to share his technique.  In general, you use RewriteCond to catch each referrer and deny them access.

# Turn on the rewrite engine, do this ONLY ONCE in the .htaccess
RewriteEngine  on

# NC is needed, OR means another block line follows this one

# Example of a “word block” in the referrer
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (badword) [NC,OR]

# Example of a URL block, you need a \ before all . and –
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (yourbadurl\.com) [NC,OR]

# Last block line (A URL block), note that the OR is missing
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (lasturl\.com) [NC]

# Deny them
RewriteRule .* – [F]

All credit should go to the source of this information which has a more detailed example.  The source can be found at the link below.

http://www.addedbytes.com/apache/block-referrer-spam/

Still, thought to share something new I learned today!