milov.nl

Interaction design • webdevelopment • web art • photography

November 2003

invasion of the blog snatchers

Something very weird is going on. Someone is copying existing weblog designs to set up 'dummy' sites on a variety of domain names, apparently to increase the hits/PageRank of some central site (there's a hidden link at the bottom of each site). Observe:

original: Kevin Sites Blog copy: worldnewslog.com original: Brian's Education Blog copy: akksess.com original: beta blog copy: jennifersblog.com original: UFO ON LINE copy: wr18.com original: Mark's Life copy: 141.85.3.115 original: Jeremy Zawodny's blog copy: 141.85.3.116 (I'm using javascript: to link to the copies to make sure they don't get any PageRank boost by my mentioning them here.) All the fake sites have an ip-address in the range 141.85.3.* and are being spammed as fake referrer urls to a number of real weblogs (mine and Knurpslog, to name two). I'm currently successfully filtering them out of my automated referrer list by checking for $REMOTE_ADDR != '217.73.164.106' && !strstr($REMOTE_ADDR, '141.85.3.'), which seem to be the hosts sending the fake referrers.