Are They Friendly Spam Bots?

Ever since August/September when I was pushing 10Gigs of traffic and 90% of that was referrer spam, I check my stats and raw logs every few days. Using a combination of pages equal hits and searching through the log I find the offending IP address and ban them. So far 152 IP addresses are no longer welcome. I have a couple of WordPress plugins running that are supposed to block some of this, but so far I’m not sure they are up to the task. Banning IPs is the only surefire way, but it means constant diligence is required.

Something new has popped up in the access logs, instead of requesting a GET which loads the page and consums bandwidth, there have been quite a few that are requesting a HEAD which doesn’t load the page and results in zero bandwidth usage. Are they being friendly?

Or are they just probe droids looking for pages to exploit?

I’m betting on the latter, so they are going on Santa’s Naughty list…