What is Referrer Spam?

If you are browsing with your browser on a website and if you are then calling another website from this former page, the browser sends the URL of the old page to the new one. This is called the "referrer". So, if you, for example, are operating a website and someone from Google comes to your site, the referrer is the Google URL, and you know that this visitor came from Google.

Of course, your server is not able to check, whether the referrer, he receives, is true. Therefore, the visitor of your site can also send a fake referrer to your website (with the help of appropriate programs). For example, that he comes from the website"example.com", though he was not even on example.com.

But what is the point? Well, many servers evaluate their referers and calculate statistics, for example, with the help of Google Analytics or in a program of the provider. The referrer spamer is now trying to create many referrrers to his page artificially to get in the statistics of the webmaster somehow. An this is called refferer spam!
2012-08-10 at 16:49

Some websites also publish directly and live a list of all referrers on the website, for example, under the heading "The last visitor came from," or the like.

I think, for this, referrer spam would make sense already, because, in this way, backlinks are possible and the occasional visitor will click on it, if the link may be sounding quite interesting.
2012-08-12 at 16:47