This is probably something others have already noticed years ago, but I just came across it this week. For a year or so now we have been keeping statistics on some of our web servers by using the popular Webalizer software. You can usually view a sites stats by adding /usage at the end of the url. Well, spammers or people who want better rankings in search engines appear to have exploited this fact.
How? Well, it looks like they make a whole bunch of requests to your site with their site as the referrer. Then when people visit your stats page, or that page gets indexed by a search engine, their links show up in some of the stats. So, so much for allowing the general internet population access to our statistics. Oh well.
Oh, and I just noticed that most people call this Referrer Spam.
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