Strange referrers

I have been getting strange referrers to my blog lately. Netfirms has pretty bad stats but it does provide links to the referrers that link to your site. As a marketing guy I generally like to think that I can find some insight into my world by looking at who links to me. So I followed the links from a number of sites that have been sending me traffic in the two or three clicks. I also should note that this is the main source of referrals. Only one other site seems to link to my site which is http://worldgineer.blogspot.com/ someone who I met while posting some odd ideas to halfbakery.com. Anyways... these referring URLs all go to the same sort of pages. Here are some of the URLs.

http://www.jfcadvocacy.net/
http://www.hdic.org/
http://www.hasslerenterprises.net/
http://www.darkangelclan.com/
http://www.devilofnights.net/

If you look at each of these sites they all have the same style of a site that has been shut down. The message at the top of these pages all say some variant of "The entire set is permanently under terms of service violation - Due to miss-proper use of the hosting account". But more of these sites keep referring to my blog. So I looked up the person responsible for the domains through whois. The pattern is thus far consistent.

Domain Name: DARKANGELCLAN.COM
Registrant: Jane Phill 61 Street New York NYC US 10044

Administrative Contact: Justine, Rianna (NIC-18209) contact69@support-4u.net Rianna Justine Lexington Ln. 71 Bronson South Dakota , US 85703
Phone: 8850462774

I also noticed that some of the links like http://www.flafeber.com/ go to an online casino site at http://casino.4host.uk.com. So I looked around this site to see what I could find on it. I did find a page where you register to link to them that is powered by a tool called Link Swapper 1.5b. I checked this out in a search and all that comes up are spammer type sites for diet pills, viagra, etc. so I have to figure there is some technology used by these blog spammers in common. The solution is to not follow the links from referrers but they do screw-up traffic statistics.

Now I have some information the next step is to see what else I can figure out about these ghost referrers. I suspect there is some form of scam, worm, virus, something involved where these folks are trying to take advantage of blogging to get sites promoted but I can't figure out how or what they are doing just yet.