We all have heard of 'web marketing' through showing ads (like pop-up browser windows you killed yesterday), 'e-mail marketing' which is another type of spam meaning advertising the products, web sites, etc... through e-mail, but Wired News reports of the new phenomenon called 'Referral Marketing'.

Referral Marketing is the process of stuffing the referral logs with the advertising sites as the referrals to a web site, so they will show up when the author of the web site checks where the visitors come from.

"Unsurprisingly, bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines. Some search engines decide site ranking by factoring in the number of pages that link to a site. A site that's linked to heavily may appear among the first URLs returned in response to users searches."

On a different (but related) note, I was redirected to an e-mail marketing site through the pop-up ads today. The site was advertising itself: 5 Million E-mail address, easiest way to market your product, ..., but the funny thing was the little mailing list subscription area on their site. They think people are stupid enough to enter their e-mail addresses there and enrich their huge e-mail list! :-)

Going back to the Giants game. Go Giants!