Fake Your Referer, Get More Traffic
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.
That was very fucked up! I was stupid enough to to visit that website.
Thanks for the great info though
should have read http://www.nickycakes.com/spy-on-redirects-and-dont-get-rickrolled/
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!
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.
[...] referer, get more traffic Fake Your Referer, Get More Traffic | NickyCakes.com Is a really good article and you guys should read it. I’ll copy and paste it. When you visit a [...]
Can you elaborate on imagefap? How do you see the top referers there?
Haha! Nice tool. Thx for this thingy! lol
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.
yeah, you could also code that bullshit app in about 5 minutes in php and save yourself $30.
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.
i was thinking more along the lines of overpriced than “dark site”
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
;]
A Rickroll! That is a messed up thing to do to your visitors…
dude, i even said it was a rickroll in the same sentence! i’m telling them to do it to others!
I found this site through my logs
Yikes, it works! Pageview++
lol!
I found this site in my web stats too, shows it works…
mustn’t spend so much time checking out my web stats!
;]
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!
hostgator ftw i guess =)
Yep. I checked my referrer log and ended up here. Thanks alot. Here’s your $0.02 adsense.
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.
Stop ref spamming me!
just kidding, you can ref spam me all you want.
Really… Do that many people use this? I have six hits in the last couple days from nickycakes.com, from different people. Lame!
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
nice horns
[...] 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 [...]
Do you need to fake your ip to do this, or just have the autoit script click away?
just click
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.
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
[...] to those who are into affiliate marketing, promoting affiliate products. This is sometimes called, Faking the Referer or Referer [...]
[...] 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 [...]
I will try that.
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.
MB
great idea. i am using it to draw traffic to my search engine for streaming movies.
http://GoogSmart.com
brilliant
Your post is a great reminder for me to get off my butt and implement an auto surfer.
thanks,
Bompa
Well, it just worked on me. Thanks for the tip.
Haha, that’s exactly how I landed here on your blog, cool stuff though, it’s all about traffic right as long as it’s ethical.
Terrance Charles
http://www.terrancecharles.com/blog
Cool Stuff.Thanks a lot.
I got here through my referrer log too when I was looking my stats.
Adult Affiliate Programs Paying by Epassporte:
http://www.adult-affiliateprograms.com/
Well I’m sure glad I checked out why this page was linking to my site
Great info Nicky, Thanks
Add to this the user-agent plugin for spoofing and you’ll get even more traction with so many people checking UAs and server logs.
Just watch out for some dark seo labs that will use it to hijack you back site.
to summerize is this all wat i hafta do to get fake reference
1.) install plugin
2.) edit the plugin and enter my url
3.) use internet as usual
, is that all or did i miss something??
if not then can u plz tell on which blog/web page would my webpage be showed as last visitors?? how does this script select these blogs??
I guess this blog is full of such crappy shi$ , dont have the time to go thru all in one go..so subcribing..lol
see if u can help me with mah queries..
Straight genius!..I agree anyone still using IE is a moron. I think of Blackhat SEO techniques as using your damn brain to get what you need done. Why do people associate Blackhat techniques as illegal?
Great Post, Im subscribing!
An interesting side effect of overwriting your referrer using this method is that pages that use the Google Maps API, including the Google Maps API page itself, issues the warning “The Google Maps API server rejected your request. This could be because the API key used on this site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/.“, and then the maps do not work.
That sure is an interesting trick.
hey,thats pretty cool how this works,i always see these sites in my stats and always click on them…thanks