I hate receiving an email ad from a company that I recognize when I can’t remember for certain whether I signed up for email or not. Did they just reactivate an old list that I’d forgotten, or have they been acting shady, picking up email addresses but not permission?
If it’s an old, forgotten list that I really did sign up for, I should just unsubscribe and have done with it. Reporting them as spam would be irresponsible and would actually make spam filters less reliable.
On the other hand, if they harvested or bought my email address, I should report it as spam…and I shouldn’t trust the unsubscribe link.
And what should be do about people like this site that spam server logs to show up as referring sites?
I generally ignore those. I’ve never seen what the point is, really. Unless someone posts their referrer logs publicly, without filtering them, the only person who will ever see it is the admin, and they’re more likely to get annoyed than anything else.
Or are you accusing me of referrer spam? I don’t do that. As I said above, I don’t see the point. (Plus, of course, I don’t like spam.) If you’re seeing this website in your referrer logs, chances are one of the following is true:
1. I really did link to your site. (I can’t be sure because you haven’t listed it.)
2. The link is in the theme or a plugin that I’m using.
3. Someone is sending fake referrers using real websites, but not their own. (I’m not sure what the point of that would be, either.)
4. Some piece of software is modifying web pages to add links.
If you are seeing what you consider to be referrer spam in your logs, please let me know (a) the URL that’s appearing and (b) the site whose logs it’s appearing in, so that I can scan my site for links. If you don’t want it made public, there’s a link to a contact form below the photo at the top of this page.