Server-wide Referrer Spam Blocking for Cpanel WHM

If like me you maintain a WordPress website, you might have recently noticed a number of referrals to your site coming from one of the following:

buttons-for-website.com,
buttons-for-your-website.com,
best-seo-offer.com,

or some other unknown, dodgy-sounding website that clearly isn’t linking to you legitimately.

This is referral spam that seeks to achieve high Google PageRank by gaming the system to create the appearance of popularity. One major way to do that is to get a high number of external backlinks and referring domains. These little spambots will visit your site and attempt to spam your WordPress installation with comments if it can, as well as dropping the appearance of referring traffic into your analytics and logs. It’s very annoying because it’s not legitimate traffic and you’ll need to know to exclude it.

It is possible to block these referrals on a per-site basis by adding the following to your site’s .htaccess file:

# Block Referer Spam
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons\-for\-website\.com
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

This is great, but what if you have a whole server of WordPress domains? Adding this directive manually to each one would be very tedious. Luckily this becomes easy in CPanel with a couple of configuration changes.

1) Follow this guide on creating a custom VirtualHost template within your CPanel installation. Once you have created both the vhost.default and ssl_vhost.default files, open them up and add the following lines to the VirtualHost directives:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteOptions Inherit

2) Go to your WHM in ‘Apache Configuration->Include Editor’ and add the blocking directive (# Block Referrer Spam referenced above) to the ‘Pre-Virtual Host Include’ area for All versions.

So what we’re doing here is telling the Apache config to inherit any Rewrite rules from the main server context for each virtual host by making a custom VirtualHost template to say that. Then we’re specifying that rule in the main server context which will inherit into each hosted site.

In this way the entire server will have their sites tested for the referral block and apply it globally. If you’re maintaining a client server this is the ideal way of taking care of this problem automatically. If you spot any more insidious referrals to your sites in future, just update the Pre-include config to check for the appropriate rewrite condition.

If you were curious, I checked and the ‘Buttons for website’ site has some 800,000 external backlinks from over 10,000 domains – that’s a lot of effort invested in trying to bump up its rank. As of today, it has a Google PageRank of 0. Spam shouldn’t and seemingly doesn’t pay!

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Pete
Pete is the person that owns this website. This is his face. His opinions are his own except when they're not, at which point you're forced to guess and your perception of what is truly real is diminished that little bit more.