I really wish this sort of thing were still usable on our modern web. This will be hijacked by spammers and it will become impossible to see legitimate mentions through the sea of spam, but it sure is a nice interface for building up a network of backlinks.
Just like Google Analytics has become useless for low traffic sites. My blog gets hundreds of page views, all from referral spam. I don't even bother trying to see if at least some real people are looking at it.
> but it sure is a nice interface for building up a network of backlinks.
The web isn't static, backlinks tend to disappear. So a one-time effort isn't useful, especially if it further complicates already bloated browsers and enables DDoS techniques.
A useful way of collecting backlinks at any point in time would be through search engines that snapshot all the visible web regularly with timestamps. It's too bad they don't offer such services anymore.
Referrer spamming is significantly else effort than this, and the validation of the target link in the source does provide a higher barrier. Parsing for microformats from the source also gives more structure to validate heuristically. Eventually a whitelist model will make more sense; the 'vouch' extension gives a way to construct one which puts more burden on the spammer than the receiver.
Just like Google Analytics has become useless for low traffic sites. My blog gets hundreds of page views, all from referral spam. I don't even bother trying to see if at least some real people are looking at it.