Referrer Spam Blocking

Referer spam is where someone will hit your site with the referer section of the browser request set to be a site they want to drive traffic to. The idea is to have links to those sites how up in any public stats pages you may have - which are common for blogs and forums.

With NGINX you can use the valid_referers module to handle this:

location / {
  valid_referers none blocked *.badreferer1.com badreferer2.com *.badreferer3.com badreferer4.net;
 
  if ($invalid_referer) {
    return   403;
  }
}

Where you replace the badreferer domains with the referer domains that you wish to block.