Background: In order to drive traffic to their web sites, some owners of web sites will run programs which
make requests to your web site and provide their web site as the referrer (in the HTTP header).
When you run a Referrers report you will then see these "spam" referrers and you might be
tempted to click on them to see what they are, thus driving up traffic to those sites.
In addition, many web sites innocently publish the reports (including referrer reports) generated
by some log file analysis programs. Spammer sites try to flood these other sites with their
referring URL so that it appears in those reports. The links back to the spammer make it look like
more web sites are linking to the spammer, thus hopefully increasing their search engine ranking.
Due to the popularity of these techniques, spam referrers are proliferating rapidly. Many web
sites get a huge amount of spam referrers every day. These spam referrers pollute your list of
actual referrers, and they also inflate the hit count of the pages that they request.
Therefore, it’s good to eliminate spam referrers. FlashStats provides the ability to filter out all
traffic which includes spam referrers. If any hit within a visit includes a spam referrer, then the
entire visit is ignored.
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