Flashes of Panic

I’m seeing more referrer spam without clear spammishness—in fact, I’m getting “referrers” from perfectly legitimate blogs which don’t have a link to here.

My current theory is that link spammers (be they referrer spammers, comment/trackback spammers, whatever,) are trying secondary spamming: boosting the pagerank of blogs they’ve spammed by spamming links to them. That was certainly the case yesterday, when all the spammed links were to weblog entries that were absolutely choked with spam comments. Today, not so much. Maybe the spam comments are elsewhere on the blogs?