Ok this is not spam as such (although I do receive over 200 a day ).
But ,going through my webstats I see that a particular website is repeatedly given as a referrer to my site.

I was interested as all sites that link to me are welcome but this site does not link to me and I am wondering if it could be suspicious ?
Here is one of the entries but I am asterisking out the identifying details in case this is harmless
***.*.***.** - - [02/Sep/2008:09:07:27 +0100] "GET /img/photos.gif HTTP/1.1" 304 329 "http://***.fr/index.php?lng=fr" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1"

I guess I could cross check the times of the entries with the arrival of junk mail in the inbox but have not done this to date.The actual website that is referring to me has very little to identify it except that it seems to be some kind of a blog with lots and lots of images about sport and no comments.

It strikes me as one of those "SEO marketing" setups.

* Set up a blog.
* Fill it with "content" (ie: anything which will bait google searches)
* ???
* Profit

There are thousands of these out there and they regularly occupy the first page of results for some fairly obscure search queries in google (but also in other engines.)

Without seeing more of the stats it's actually impossible to tell for sure but that would be my first guess.

SiL

Well I have solved the problem as I now see they have used an image on my site as an image on theirs.So they are downloading a file from my site every time they get a visit to their own page.
I have sent them a polite request to remove the link and suggest that they save the image to their own server if they want to carry on using it!

I have seen some sites where the person whose image was being leeched set it up so the other site would end up with a porn image and a rude message instead.

indeed


I suppose, if you chose that route, you could take that option too

lol....ofcourse, I/We can't endorse nor recommend those actions......but I have seen it done, usually on "off topic" forums, etc...


Thank god for imageshack, photobucket, bayimg.com, etc for free image hosting

I got a quick response from the website but was otherwise going to go down that route of replacing the image - in the event of non compliance or simply if there was no means of contact to or response from the website.

It would have been a text image but it wasn't necessary.

I also toyed with the idea of accepting the annoyance in return for the link value but there was none unfortunately!
thanks for your answers