This month I find anumber of strange referer entries in my server log. Access to one of my pages comes from an unknown IP and is usually the only one from that address. They refer to non-existing sites or ones clearly advertising something.
I made a search and it's called referer spam. There are texts about it. Such spam is here for quite a long time.
It makes no sense at first. Web server logs are only seen by site administrator. So how can it work? The obvious solution is that administrator may be curious and click the link. The number of visits gained this way is small. There should be something more. And there is. Blogs.
Quite many blogs have dynamic list of sites refering to them. Referer spam changes such lists. That's not the main reason, however. Search engines browse sites and count refernences. The more sites link to yours (from referer spam or not), you get higher rate by the engine. That's how referer spam works. It places spammers sites higher in the ranking.
Having static pages has good points.