Buttons-for-website.com Referrer Spam

I discovered buttons-for-website.com in this blogs referrer logs about a month ago. Since then it’s been popping up in all my sites logs a lot. Sometimes 25 times each day.

However navigating to buttons-for-website.com redirects a visitor to sharebutton.net. That website is offering this code to add share buttons to your website. I’ll be damn if i would insert that code into my website.
My first thought was it could be used for phishing social media login credentials when someone inserted the code into their website or blog. If a visitor to your site clicked the Facebook share button for example and logged in to their account it could possibly harvest their user id and password. I would trust that code as far as i could throw it.

If you want to add top notch sharing code to your site, use AddThis.com its what i use here on the left. Just register your free account. Then select your services. I also have the mobile device bottom sharing bar active. Then paste their one line of code into your page header. Quick easy and best of all it’s safe for your site visitors to use.

Regardless whether buttons-for-website.com is harmless or not, I prefer not having it attach itself to my sites via common referrer spam. To block it’s probing of your site and it’s articles, media, etc, you can use .htaccess to block it as a referrer.

Below is a snippet of my bad_bot list. You can just copy and paste this code into your .htaccess file. But be sure to make a backup of your current file. If you make a mistake it will break your site!

# Begin Bad Bot Blocking
BrowserMatchNoCase sharebutton.net bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase buttons-for-website.com bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_bot
# End Bad Bot Blocking

Do you have a Google webmaster tools account? If not i suggest you register one by clicking here. If you already have a webmaster tools account, have a look at the link that says “Search Traffic > Links To Your Site” have a look see who Google reports linking to your site. On the left main table you will see “Who links the most” at the bottom click the more link. Have a look at the domains linking to your website or blog. Mousing over a domain should show a site preview.

The whole idea here is to disavow spammy low quality sites linking to you. Before you attempt doing this have a look at Webmaster Tools Help Page that explains the process. Don’t disavow any good links that can have a negative impact on your sites page rank.

Any questions comment below.