Fake Facebook referrals

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 23, 2017 at 8:26 pm

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  Every time I post a blog I get an immediate view from the US which says it’s come through Facebook. I was suspicious that anyone was reading my posts so quickly so tried it by posting a status with the link to my blog but making it so only I could see it and it still happened. How do I stop this? Are my other stats correct?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  tehila440 · Member · Oct 23, 2017 at 8:34 pm

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  Hi,

  Is your blog set to private? If so then your site stats page will show visits you made to your page.

  Here is more details about site stats

  Jetpack Stats

  Let me know if this helps.

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 23, 2017 at 8:35 pm

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  It’s not set to private (and I’m not in the US). Thanks for trying though!

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  tehila440 · Member · Oct 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm

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  Let me tag a staff member to look further into this

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  supernovia · Staff · Oct 23, 2017 at 10:41 pm

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  Hi @musingsofanewlythirtysomething, typically you’d see this if you’re sharing the site to Facebook automatically.

  I don’t see any active connections, but did you have that set up before?

  Also, are you getting a view on each post as you publish it, or is it just that you’re getting another link in from Facebook at the same time?

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 24, 2017 at 8:27 am

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  Hi,

  Thanks for replying. I don’t think I’ve ever had automatic sharing set up – I usually copy and paste a link into my Facebook status (because I have different privacy settings for different posts).

  Each time I link to a post on Facebook I get a seemingly automatic view from America with FB as the referral. It happens regardless of when the post on WordPress was published (I tried it out with some old ones last night with only me able to see my link and it still happened).

  It’s very annoying as I only have a small amount of stats and now I don’t know if any are true views!

  Thanks!

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 24, 2017 at 8:28 am

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  Different privacy settings for different Facebook posts I should say, not for WordPress posts

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  akumarjain · Staff · Oct 24, 2017 at 8:45 am

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  @musingsofanewlythirtysomething, I would attribute this automatic view to the Facebook bot which pays a visit to your site to extract the title, image, and content to be displayed along with your Facebook post when you share the link to your blog post on Facebook.

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 24, 2017 at 9:34 am

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  Ah okay, this is helpful to know, thanks. So all my other stats should be true, there’ll just be one US visit every time I post a link that I should ignore?

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  akumarjain · Staff · Oct 24, 2017 at 10:37 am

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  Correct about all stats being true. Ignoring the one view from Facebook is your choice.

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  supernovia · Staff · Oct 24, 2017 at 6:21 pm

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  Thanks @akumarjain – I’m sure that’s exactly right. I’ve even seen mysterious views appear because a person’s browser has previews built in.

  Anything that fetches a preview will likely count as at least one view before they cache the result.

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  musingsofanewlythirtysomething · Member · Oct 24, 2017 at 6:28 pm

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  Thanks this is all very helpful!

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  akumarjain · Staff · Oct 25, 2017 at 5:50 am

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  You’re welcome @supernovia.