The Strangeness of Having a Blog

Having a blog is an interesting way of observing the world around you. I keep track, as most do, of where you readers come from, and how often you visit, of course all in anonymous, aggregate fashion. One of the things I pay particular attention to is my referrer log, which is the bit of web site statistics that keeps track of which sites have links to me that you readers actually follow to get here. Most of them are pretty much what you might expect: Google search results, Yahoo search results, other wine and food blogs. But today as I was looking through those stats, I was shocked to see that my number 30 most frequent referrer (with 575 referrals already this month) is www.iaea.org. Yes, that's right, the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the ones that send nastygrams to Iran and North Korea telling them to lay off the enriched Uranium.

Huh ?!?

The Internet is a strange, strange place. I can't find any reference to Vinography anywhere on their site, of course. Any wine loving UNIX hacks out there who can venture a guess as to what's going on?

Posted by: Alder on March 12, 2005 3:05 PM: Share this post elsewhere Digg it! - Add to del.icio.us - Add to Stumbleupon - Add to Reddit; Filed under: Ramblings and Rants

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Comments (1)

Daniel R Somerfield wrote:

03.12.05 at 3:54 PM

Well, I can't shed light on why it would be from the IAEA, but I do have a guess why you would have spurious referrers. The latest form of spam is, unfortunately, referrer log spam, wherein bots come around and pretend they were referred from whatever sites you came from. It pumps their names into your logs and if they are lucky, you publish the results and it raises their search engine rankings. It's a big pain because then you can't tell who is really referring to you. It is pretty well impossible to beat these guys.

Take a look at the whole log entries. I suppose it is possible that someone is trying to "Google Bomb" the IAEA and associate it with some particular word.