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If you watch your web stats ( or server logs ) there's a report showing where your viewers came from. You could create a link from your site to mine, in the hopes I'll see you on my logs, and click out of curiosity to see what your site is about and why you're linking to me. If you have advertising, there's some chance I might even click that.
Apparently a lot of web servers are set up to publish these logs to the world, which means the search bots would see a link to your site ( in the report ).
So the particular type of spam bot Chris is talking about would be one that spoofs the referrer header, to do what I just described without actually creating a link and clicking it.
I get plenty of this stuff in my logs, but fortunately those are private right out of the box. Having links from your domain out to a spammy neighborhood doesn't make Google like you very much. It's also a waste of your bandwidth, but that's getting so cheap these days. I think the main problem is this obscures your picture of how your site is doing, if some of the clicks aren't human.
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The Pacific Northwest | Escheresque | Avery Point, Connecticut
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