Strange web client access pattern

I have been noticing some strange web access in my logs. I mentioned them in this earlier post. The request looks like this:

213.172.36.XX - - [07/Dec/2004:16:05:53 -0800] "GET /index.php?op=viewarticle&articleid=105&blogid=2 HTTP/1.0" 200 49712 "http://www.XXXXXX.info/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

All of these request have the same interesting traits:

1. All of the urls have been converted to lower case. (With my blog system, this will cause the main page to be returned everytime)


2. All of the requests have referral urls in the .info root domain


3. The hosts specified in the referral do not resolve. But domains appear to have been registered though a French domain registrar, with made up names for the contacts

I have no idea what they are trying to do. I could understand it if these request caused comment to be entered. Or even if this blog showed a list of all of the referrals for each of the accesses.

The only thing that I could think that they are trying to do is to get their domains listed on site traffic monitoring services like Site Meter. But if that were true, you would think that those host names would resolve.