Like Gloria Craney, I find myself obsessed by referrer spam. For the past few days I've often kept half an eye on my access logs, trying to make sure all requests get 301'd. I tweaked my .htaccess rules. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi. I waged a defensive war.
Along with renaming mt-comments.cgi, I also added a meta header so Google and other search engines wouldn't index the new location. But I'm still getting hits to mt-comments.cgi (which is getting them nice 410 errors, but I don't think they're paying any attention; after all, they only care about referrers).
Google will eventually run through again and delete the expired links, but they also have an automatic URL removal system. You have to create a login and password (only in order to verify your email address), and then you can request page removal. If you want to know what script pages Google has indexed, use this query string:
mt-comments.cgi site:yourdomain.com
So that's what I did for a while this evening—copying and pasting URLs from Google's search results into their removal form. It's tedious, but it gets those URLs out of the reach of comment and referrer spammers.
(Did anyone get the reference in the subject? It's from The Phantom Tollbooth.)
Dorothea Salo says:
I got it. :) Would you like an eye-dropper? Or a needle?