Feedback on Reporting Spam Referrers
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Very happy with the announcement in the forum sticky about being able to tag spam referrers directly in our New Dash stats page.
But please add WordPress.com’s other language forums to the whitelist, too!
Thanks!
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Rather than starting a new topic, I thought I’d post this here regarding the new facility about tagging spam referrers. I really appreciate WP trying to tackle some issues about spam referrers, but I am not sure this is working fully in my case?
Like many other bloggers I’ve been seeing a certain problematic “SEO” referrer, Se**lt, messing up my stats over the last four weeks. I found the Spam Referrer facility before reading the forum sticky and hit the “Spam?” link next to that specific URL. I no longer see that name in the Referrers list on my Dashboard or in my Referrers Summary history.
With finding the sticky post: I am somewhat confused about what this “Spam?” facility does. After over 24 hours I am still seeing a pattern in the Views By Country on my Dashboard that are precisely the unusual, to me, by country views I was getting from that specific referrer. The only thing that has changed is their name not showing up in the Referrers list.
Is this the correct way it should be handling these views, or is this an issue that needs further investigation since this facility rolled out?
My blog is: http://imaginationisspicy.com
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@caroisspicy We cannot block individual visits from a public WordPress.com site, as it is available to anyone who has access to the internet.
While Semalt or other entities won’t show up in your referrers, your traffic could still be coming from lots of different places. While it may be curious, I wouldn’t worry about it.
@justjennifer That’s a good suggestion. I will let our developers know.
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clicking on “spam?” does not work on the ipad
spam referrers should be blocked and not counted in the stats
there is a code to put in .htaccess but i don’t know how to do it
can someone please post instructions?
found here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam/Denying_Access#Denythanks,
pghrower.com -
WordPress.com users do not have access to the .htaccess file. As for the iPad issue, I will investigate that further. In the meantime, you may need to log in on a computer to block Semalt or other referrers.
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So even if someone blocks Semxxt or another site – what is happening to the page views they generate – seems to me that all “blocking does is remove a particular name from view in the stats, but Semxxt is probably visiting a few pages or maybe many pages, what about the page views, and what is Semxxt anyway – is it a Bot of some type that is not identifying itself as a bot? some of the referrals indicate it is a “web crawler” of some sort –
From Google Webmaster tools I can see that Google’s search engine crawls on average about 50 to 75 pages a day, traffic that is filtered out.
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Jackiedana,
I was able to do “spam referrer” on my laptop.Semalt & spam referrers are really not blocked, they are still included in the total site stats (& by subtraction, you can know how many views were by spam referrers). The only thing it does is not to have their URL show up in the stats (which hopefully discourages them).
Thanks,
Pghrower -
(& by subtraction, you can know how many views were by spam referrers).
Sorry – not correct – a referral is not a 1:1 – one referral might be many page views – but no way to know what the true numbers are because of the way our stats work
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Right but it still gives you an idea about how many spam views there are relative to organic views
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The thing is, we can’t block page views. Anyone (or anything) can view public WordPress.com sites just like any other site, unless they are blocked from their end. All we can do is hide the referrers.
As far as what counts in the stats, that’s another issue. Right now I don’t think Semalt or anything else is drastically affecting site stats across the board, but if that were to change, we might try to address that separately.
As far as blocking referrers, it doesn’t appear to be possible within the WordPress app at this time, but you can use the spam blocker if you use a browser on your iPad to view your Dashboard/stats.
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