My new theory is that
My new theory is that referrer spam is used to increase the amount of links to the referring websites since many pages detailing referer logs get crawled by Google. It's probably effective: do a search for "Generated by Webalizer Version" on Google (Webalizer is a popular search analysis tool), thus pre-selecting 112,000 referrer logs that are crawled by Google, and spam those sites with your site as referrer, thus increasing your pagerank. I would have kept my mouth shut but people are already doing it, so I might as well speak out.
# Mar 17, 2003