A week or so ago I started noticing some “sketchy” sites popping up on my TERRIBL Widget. When I checked them out I found no links to my site at all. After looking at my reports and log files and doing some experiments of my own, I figured out that most of these entries were coming from proxies, Perl scripts, and CURL calls and were completely bogus. So I started working on a way to automatically detect and block these and other invalid Referer’s from showing up on the sidebar widget. What I came up with was to do a callback to their site using the file_get_contents() function and scan their page for a link to the page in question. Then, only if the link was verified would the Referer be approved and added to the widget. After some testing on a few different sites using multiple methods for invoking these entries I felt satisfied that my new filtering technique was ready. So download this new version and let me know how it works for you!