[vox-tech] Website Referral From Porn Site

[Troy Arnold]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 02:20:22PM -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:
> I've got a business website; www.legalargument.net.
> 
> This site is for my legal research and writing law practice.  It contains some 
> useful legal information, mostly dealing with different types of subpoenas.
> 
> I check my web stats, given to me by my webhosting service, almost every day.  
> There is a chart labeled, "Top 30 of 53 Total Referrers."  Here is the entry 
> for the seventh top referrer, indicating 5 "hits."


Some web sites, by design or accident, have their access log reports
publicly accessible via something like awstats or webalizer.  If a search
engine crawls those areas and finds a hyperlink in the referral area that
doesn't have the rel="nofollow" attribute set, then the search engine may
count that link as something of an endorsement for the spam site and
therefore increase its relevance for certain search terms.  At least,
that's the spammmers thinking.  Maybe they really wish to be found under a
search for "legal porn" :/

-t