Referer Spam
Referer spam is something a website owner should watch for.
To quote wikipedia:
The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.
Sometimes the requests are so often the website is bogged down as in a denial of service attack.
Why spam using a fake referer? Many bloggers will post their most popular URLs which in this case would be the spammer - free advertising.
If you have an apache server blocking fake URLs is easy via the .htaccess file. Ask your webmaster how to block them.
Doug