Huge increase in referrer spam – Is it something I'm doing?
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Hi, my blog:
http://www.gamegameblog.wordpress.com
has had a massive increase in referrer spam over the last few days, all from the same site, which goes through an adfly link to truthway, a religious website.
I know I’m not the only person experiencing this, so does it have anything to do with tags or content, or is it totally random?
Cheers
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi. It looks like you’re not the only people calling it an increase:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/increase-in-spam-referrer-links?replies=3Report the spammy referrers to staff directly:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/Reminder: they know about this and are continuously looking into it.
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/weird-sites-are-sending-me-trafficshould-i-worry?replies=6#post-565625 -
WP.com blogs recently got some kind of boost in Google standings. Every SEO boost is accompanied by an increase in spam, alas.
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I noticed the same thing and I’ve found it unsettling. From the ego end of it, I love seeing that I’ve had a boatload of views but when the referrer is a spam site it just deflates me. From the privacy end of it, it feels like I’m being compromised…in some way, not really sure how. I can’t imagine that there is an army of people at ad.fly that sit around actually reading all of our blogs. Is WordPress really in the know about this.
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I’ve been getting a lot of spam referrers as well – no sooner do I report one then 3 more pop up. It’s frustrating! Today alone I had 38 “views” from one spam link.
I would love to see WordPress implement some sort of quick button that we, the bloggers, can individually mark a link as spam (thus moving it to the Other Views spam content space.) That way I wouldn’t have to keep bothering the support team with numerous emails about new links.
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It’s definitely unsettling. I don’t really mind the extra hits, I have a good idea what I get on an average day, but the attempts to get me to go to another site are just strange.
The site at the end of the chain, truthway, is a repository of videos, essays and the like by Ahmed Deedat, a controversial muslim scholar. I didn’t know who he was and now I do thanks to this.
Stellar marketing I suppose, but a dead religious leader reading my blog freaks me out a little.
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If you keep referring these links to staff via the Help button, they’ll remove them from your stats and in future you won’t see them.
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Response from staff:
Thanks for reporting this – we are aware of this problem and are working hard to find a solution to fix it.
Some background: what you’re experiencing is called “Referrer Spam”, and it’s an unfortunate side effect of the way statistics tracking works. Spammers take advantage of the referrer logs and visit your blog from phantom URLs that they are actually trying to promote, in the hope that you see them in your logs and click them.
In the meantime, you can rest assured that there is no security risk here, to you or to you blog. It’s just an annoyance, but one we will hopefully be able to get rid of very soon.
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/tons-of-hits-from-spam-domain?replies=29#post-548475These spam referrers do not in any way affect your blog’s Google page ranking.
1. Do not click the links.
2. Do not post the URL or names of the site into forum threads.
3. Report all spam referrals to Staff directly .
http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/unwanted-referrers?replies=6#post-553425
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