Need more spam referrer clarification – are they visitors, too?
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Hi there,
Sorry to add another post on the issue of spam referrers, but I need some clarification. Do spam referrers produce real visits to your site? If I mark a referrer as spam, I know that they will not longer appear under ‘referrers’, but is there still a visit recorded associated to that referrer?
In other words, how reliable are the visitor stats when you have spam referrers?
Thanks
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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OK, I see “If you mistakenly mark a site as spam, this will not affect your site’s visits or stats count,” so that answers my question – the number of visits is not changed.
I’d like to make a suggestion, then – it seems like marking a referrer as spam is counterproductive in that you lose the ability to see how many of your visits are not actually by real visitors. I think that this outweighs the benefit of having a nicer looking list of referrers. I’m currently regretting having marked certain referrers as spam because now I cannot see how many times they have hit my site. Marking a referrer as spam should also remove that hit from the visits count or else the feature shouldn’t exist.
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I believe the feature may have been created to pacify those who did not want to see the spam referrers in their stats. There are no plans afoot for the spam referrers IP’s to be blocked and anyone can get an new IP in seconds flat so please be aware of that.
I can provide more details on stats for you. Our stats are not real time stats and take time to update. There are frequent fluctuations that most do not notice because we aren’t watching the process. For details see here http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/ and note the views and viewers take hours to update.
Our stats are page view stats. But please do not assume that everyone who clicks a follow, like, share, reblog or comment link actually reads the post on your blog because odds are they may not.
Follow, like, share, reblog or comment clicks are not page views. In fact, follows, likes, shares, comments and reblogs are completely misleading when you are talking about page view stats.
Your followers and anyone with a WordPress.com/Gravatar account who is logged into WordPress.com can “follow” your blog, “like”, “share” and “reblog” your posts and “comment” in several locations such as the Reader, without ever clicking into your blog and creating a single page view stat. Subscribers control how frequently they receive your posts (instantly, daily, weekly) and can comment without clicking into the blog.
Logged in visitors using a mobile can read the full post without creating a page view stat. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/wordpresscom-reader-show-full-text?replies=31#post-1373606
You can control the length of the entry sent out on your RSS feed here Dashboard > Settings > Reading. Choose the “summary” setting for your RSS feed rather than to “full text”. That will compel followers who are not using mobiles to click into the blog to read the full post which will create a page view stat.
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