How do I block referrers that are linking to my server?

needforspeed · 07-04-2005, 07:36 PM

I am getting quite a few hits to my site from referrers that shouldn't be directing people to me, looks like spam sites or something, I can't even find a link or anything to me on them. Most of them are originating from dating-s.net/umax/sitemap/ or something from the same domain. The hits from these referrers never go past the index.php page

I googled and found out that I can put some lines in my .htaccess file and it would either give users from that referrer a 403 error, or I can have it redirect them to notice.html which will notify the person browsing that they were referred by that site and to check for spyware and whatnot. (Seems to me like it's people who have spyware/adware that are getting redirected to my site somehow)

Anyway, the .htaccess file doesn't seem to be stopping them, as my index.php writes it's own log file that has referrer info in it, and these things are still getting through. Seems like it's mostly the same IP doing this also.

Is there any other way to stop this? Can somebody tell me what exactly is going on with these referrers? I can post portions of the log file if necessary.

TIA

stefan_nicolau · 07-05-2005, 08:01 PM

I assume you use apache:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_access.html

Code:

SetEnvIf Referer ^yourwebsiteregexp let_me_in
<Directory />
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=let_me_in
</Directory>

OR

Code:

SetEnvIf Referer ^badguyregexp get_out
<Directory />
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=get_out
</Directory>