Fake Your Referer, Get More Traffic
Posted on January 8th, 2008 in Link Building, Traffic Generation
When you visit a website, several pieces of information are usually recorded by that site. Your IP, Browser, and Referer address are a few of them. The Referer address is the address of the page you just came from. Most webmasters, from time to time, check their Referer log to see where their traffic is coming from. When they see traffic coming from a website they haven’t heard of, they go to check it out to see why this website linked to them.Using this to your advantage to build a little extra traffic for your site is easy. If you use Firefox (and you should, because IE is for morons), you can go grab a plugin called RefControl. Refcontrol allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever you want. So just put in your site address and browse the web normally. Keep in mind that this will, in some cases, annoy the crap out of people, but if you know anything about Nickycakes, annoying the crap out of people is a benefit and not a drawback.
If you were so inclined, you could also write a curl script to go to random pages all day spamming your referer url all over the place. This will actually serve 2 purposes. First, as already mentioned, webmasters will check you out to see why you’re linking to them. Second, some statistics packages keep a public log of traffic, indexed by google. By spamming your referer all over the place, you will end up on some of these lists and generate backlinks for yourself. This is sometimes referred to as “Referer Bombing”.
And for the ultimate Rickroll, use http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com as your referer at all times.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
That was very fucked up! I was stupid enough to to visit that website.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Thanks for the great info though
January 8th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
should have read http://www.nickycakes.com/spy-on-redirects-and-dont-get-rickrolled/
January 8th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Would be cool to run this off a server, load it with 100k+ URLs and set a cron to visit 3k different pages ever day.
Should result in a nice stream of traffic. If anyone has such thing or knows where to get it pls post.
Thanks.
P.S. I was also dumb enough to visit the website and my FF f*cked up. Cheers!
January 9th, 2008 at 2:26 am
There’s this imagehost called imagefap that displays the top referrers for all galleries. It has been “referrer bombed” for the last 6 months or so and the owners don’t seem to care much. Perhaps this is a good target for those interested in exploiting this idea
It should bring very good traffic, as that site gets millions of visitors every day.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:25 am
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January 9th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Can you elaborate on imagefap? How do you see the top referers there?
January 9th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Haha! Nice tool. Thx for this thingy! lol
January 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Hey Nickycakes,
there is another progy - a bot - whith fake-referer. It’s called Magic Traffic Bot: http://www.magictrafficbot.com and with your with your rickroll-referer it’s also very funny.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
yeah, you could also code that bullshit app in about 5 minutes in php and save yourself $30.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
who said that I paid for this bullshit app?
I thought you might be interested in it. Sure, this traffic bot is more for the dark site of seo.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
i was thinking more along the lines of overpriced than “dark site”
January 10th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Wow, thanks for the tip! This would probably qualify as “grey hat”, somewhat analogous to using Alexa redirects in forum signatures and the like, but as long as it’s not illegal and doesn’t get us banned by the search engines, it could be used as a way to bring in traffic.
And yes, I saw this page in my referrer stats
January 10th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
;]
January 11th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
A Rickroll! That is a messed up thing to do to your visitors…
January 11th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
dude, i even said it was a rickroll in the same sentence! i’m telling them to do it to others!
January 13th, 2008 at 2:58 am
I found this site through my logs
Yikes, it works! Pageview++
January 16th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
lol!
I found this site in my web stats too, shows it works…
mustn’t spend so much time checking out my web stats!
;]
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:38 am
I never heard of rickroll til now. And yes, I also fell for that crap.
I found this site from my stats as well, well almost, see someone visited my from a site that led to your site.
We are IP neighbors. Check it out!
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 am
hostgator ftw i guess =)
January 24th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Yep. I checked my referrer log and ended up here. Thanks alot. Here’s your $0.02 adsense.
January 24th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I’ve used a couple different software packages which do the same thing on automatic. You can use whatever url’s you want and build monster backlinks with this technique if its done right.
January 24th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Stop ref spamming me!
January 24th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
just kidding, you can ref spam me all you want.
January 27th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Really… Do that many people use this? I have six hits in the last couple days from nickycakes.com, from different people. Lame!
January 30th, 2008 at 4:39 am
I got here through my referrer log. This is ingenious as I know you did not visit my site. I am dumd. Very dumb for I still use IE and I like it. If you are dumb like me, check out my dumb site at http://www.amazonhealthpills.com/index.htm
February 12th, 2008 at 10:21 am
nice horns
February 12th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
[…] One such thing is the using a forged referrer back to your website on all websites you visit. ( See Fake Your Referer, Get More Traffic ) I’m testing this now, so if you got here by finding my site in your logs, let me […]
February 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Do you need to fake your ip to do this, or just have the autoit script click away?
February 14th, 2008 at 10:31 am
just click
March 7th, 2008 at 2:54 am
What about using the gecko engine itself?
I’m not sure if it’s ever been done, or if it’s even worth the hassle, but the code is open source so you should be able to automate it.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:37 am
does this mean that the more we browse the website the more traffic our website will get.
Also please tell me whether google analytics counts these referers or not?
Thanks
March 20th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
[…] to those who are into affiliate marketing, promoting affiliate products. This is sometimes called, Faking the Referer or Referer […]
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 am
[…] I’m on the subject of shady SEO, here’s another tactic I’m trying: Referrer Bombing. Nickycakes has written a couple of decent articles on the subject, and it’s pretty easy to […]
March 24th, 2008 at 2:56 am
I will try that.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 am
Wow, I fell off my chair after reading this post. It totally boggles my mind how many ways we can get spammed without knowing it. Sheesh, gotta try it out anyway, just can’t help myself.
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