Jelle Druyts

A while ago, I wrote a simple dasBlog hack to show my referrers (use the links on the site's navigation bar or watch my public referrers directly). Works great, but there's one small issue with it... I'm getting a lot of google-trash on my site lately, and it's snowballing so I'm going to have to try and halt that.

Somehow, sometime, someone came up to my site with the word 'kcarc' (spelled backwards to try and prevent the problem you're about to discover ) somewhere in his google referral. So that shows up in my public referrers page. No big deal, since I have a robots.txt file that tells google and co to bluntly ignore that page instead of indexing it.

Unfortunately, either I was too late, or something's wrong with my robots.txt file (it validates though) or google isn't playing nice - because it did get indexed. So looking for that specific word might get you here. And get your search query listed on my referrers page. And getting that indexed as well. And drawing more trashy traffic... And it's been snowballing ever since, because now I'm getting more and more referrals that come looking for "free-version-patches" of their favorite software (which I don't provide, as you might have noticed around here, it's not that kind of technology site).

So I hacked my hack to exclude all referrers that contain the dreaded c-word... Hope that'll help to keep my referrer logs clean. I wouldn't want to close the page down, they're too much fun to read once in a while really

Update: I added some more words that needed to be blocked (I feel a new hobby coming up), and I've also removed the google and feedster queries from the main referrer url list (since they're already listed below) which makes the top list a lot cleaner. Cool (if I say so myself)!