So I'm checking out my HTTP referrals for this website. These are indications of where visitors came from to visit this site. For example, if you were at The Nickel Arcade and clicked a link to visit this site, I would see an HTTP referral from "www.nickelarcade.net". If you click on the link above to go to the site, Nickel Arcade will now have an HTTP referral from me. Pretty simple, and sometimes pretty cool.

In the hands of pornographers, though, it can be a devious and deceptive tool.

The trick isn't to bring people to your site, assuming you peddle porn, by having them click through the website that hosts the HTTP referral. That would be almost pointless. Unless the blog bot had some way of leaving behind a link in the comments of every site it visited, no one would ever really know that it was there. Of course, this happens, but it isn't what we are talking about here.

Google, that slick little search engine, relies in part on ranking pages by the number of links that are inbound. It figures, and rightly so, that the most popular results are probably pretty close to the actual results that you want. Web page popularity is a techno-drug that drives most of the interconnections between information on the Internet. Google simply provides a front-end to the back-end machinations.

Enter the porn people. It seems to be a new phenomenon, just starting to make its appearance on web sites, but it is raising eyebrows and wrinkling brows. Visiting blogs simply to create an entry in an HTTP referral page effectively creates a link to a website that didn't exist before. This, in turn, increases the referred pages popularity as Google happens upon these entries in HTTP referral logs.

Interestingly, the pages actually linked are not porn pages themselves. They are stolen websites, templates and content from other locations. One difference, though -- at the bottom of the page is a link to a porn page. As the referred pages increase in popularity, the links to porn increase in popularity, and Google places a higher importance on them and their content.

How do you avoid this? If you don't have a website, obviously you don't care about this. If you do, you may want to follow the instructions at this website to create a block for the most popular IP addresses that these websites reside at. Specifically, you will block 217.73.164.106 and 141.85.3.130. Once defined in your .htaccess file, visits from these IP addresses will be rejected and they will not appear in your HTTP referral logs. Until, of course, they start using new IP addresses.