When did spammers start injecting spam into referrer logs? I was checking out the list of referrers for individual items on the site and noticed that for one obscure item, there are a ton of referrers from various porn and drug related sites, all in a row. I’m not sure what the expected return on such spam is, or why they’d bother with it, but I am somewhat intrigued. Rather than speculating idly, I turn to Google.

There was an item published on 5/31/2001 at Kuro5hin about referrer log spam. Other than that piece, I don’t see too much of interest on the phenomenon. I’m certain this was some sort of spam blast, because there were 10 hits or so in a row for the same item, all with different (bizarre but vaguely related) URLs as the referrer.