phantom referrals
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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting more and more referrals from sites that, when I click through from my stats page, don’t appear to have any content related to my own blog.
Today, there are four such ‘phantom’ referrals.
http://digg.com/azlanhussain.com/2010/02/01/my-short-experience-with-ipad/
http://opticalillusionsgallery.blogspot.com/2010/02/optical-illusions-no-2.html
http://opticalillusionsgallery.blogspot.com/2010/03/optical-illusions-no-19.html
http://rezekimurah.com/jom-diving/mudah-mudahan-rezekiku-murah.html
All of these sites appear to be running a live activity feed.
It doesn’t seem to be malicious (though the second optical illusion link diverts to another page entirely) but it is quite irritating. Does anyone have an idea what’s going on here? And how I could stop it?
Thanks
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I’ve been having the same problem but I’m afraid to click on the links. I got rezekimurah.com and don’t want to click it! I think it’s a bunch of baloney.
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Hi,
I’m in France and I’m getting rezekimurah dot etc. as well! And the opticalillussions etc site (which, unlike rezek. doesn’t actually exist BTW). Another is watch-for-free. If I see an unfamiliar referrer, I google them rather than click through.
I don’t allow comments on my blog anymore so this is puzzling. Some of these ‘phantom referrers’ return repeatedly, often within the same day. I wonder what on earth they’re doing. I hope it is a case of ‘don’t click on them, and they’ll go away’; but so far it doesn’t seem to be the case with rezekimurah (? Indonesian/Malaysian – certainly from a source/country that is NOT flagged up in my StatCounter).
The most worrying thing about them was for a week or so I had nothing in the ‘referrer’ rubric except these phantoms. That’s theoretically impossible: clearly regulars were visiting so should have been leaving either their own URLs or Google Reader, etc traces.
Can any of the resident techies please kindly explain all this to us – and, if poss, what remedies there might be.
Cheers! -
The plot thickens.
One thing I forgot to mention in my original post. The live activity / recent visitors feeds on the sites I mentioned above all have a lot of wordpress blogs on them. It feels like we’re being targetted here.
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Hi, just checked my blog – and there are a whole load more of these strange URLs! And I’ve had quite a few visits from regulars – whose URLs are not being flagged up in the ‘referrers’ slot. Seems like the phantoms are preventing the real ones from appearing.
Curiouser and curiouser …
Can someone from WP explain, pls? I’ve already logged a Q in support. -
I too am having these issues … with three sites in particular … One of which is also this “rezekimurah”. It would be good if there were a way for bloggers to be able to select a particular referrer … and mark for “never to return” or — you know what I mean. I agree — doesn’t seem malicious … simply annoying … and altering legitimate blog statistics.
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I’ve been experiencing the same issue. Some of the phantom links include:
howtohainmusclequickly (they can’t even spell gain right)
watch-free-here
secured-personal-loans-bad-credit
cheaptravelstyle
tipstohairremoval
freeepisodeI’ve logged a support query and included the two links to the forums here.
As well, I do believe some of these links are malicious. I made the mistake of clicking the link for “tipstohairremoval” and my computer was immediately attacked by spyware and adware. So be careful. Not all of these links are simply annoying.
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Hello, David – yup all the ones you mention in your original post before arriving on this thread have infested my ‘referrals’ on the Stats page, too. Plus a whole lot more, mostly completely bogus ‘blogspot.com’ URLs (I googled ’em). Strange … even stranger, as I have never clicked on any of them + have a ‘no comment’ policy on the blog.
This has been happening for a couple of weeks. At first, none of my regular readers’ URLs/Google reader refs appeared although they should have done (their visits were logged by StatCounter). Now these are appearing; but rezeki & co are increasing and getting more varied. As ‘Undeleted’ suggests, it really does look as if we’re all being targeted. Why? Where from? How? Mystery!
As long as it isn’t harmful, I suppose we can ignore it all; but it is so rare for these things to be benign … -
Hi, I’m having the same strange URLs. Started a few weeks ago I guess. My stats went up but no comments so I began checking, and every day they keep coming back.
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My most sincere apologies for the delay, I somehow managed to miss this thread. I can say we are looking into this. I’ll post back here as soon as I have more info!
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Hi Hanni – welcome! And no need to apologise, with a free service ANY help is appreciated. Look forward to hearing further when you and your fellow WP mavens have worked out what’s happening. Just logged into my blog to find that it is completely full of referrers. They are all phantoms with the exception of one legit blogger who definitely isn’t the only visitor my blog’s had in the past 24 hours …!
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Remember that a referrer doesn’t mark who is visiting your blog – it tells you where they came from if they clicked a link to get to your blog.
As Hanni said, we are definitely looking into this.
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Here an update from my end:
I logged on using a live Ubuntu CD so I could explore the phantom referrer links. None of them actually had any of my content posted (as I was concerned they may have been scraping content). I also noted that many of these sites are using WordPress.
My suspicion is that nobody is coming from these sites and nobody is clicking on any links. I’m also concerned that my blog stats from the past two weeks are totally bogus. Thoughts?
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Hi Markel, many thanks for adding your confirmation. Yes, ‘referrers’ logs provenance links; it’s just that most of these aren’t showing up as they usually do. Instead, I’m getting the phantoms. These fill up the log so that legit visitors who’ve typically clicked on my comment on theirs/another person’s blog or my link on someone’s blogroll don’t tend to appear. I know there have been new visitors from links/comments on legit sites; but I can’t identify them as they aren’t listed as referrers. Any advice from you, Hanni and other WordPress would be wonderful. Look forward to it – and, again, thanks for your help and attention so far.
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Can’t help with the phantom referrals issue, but to keep track of legit links, you can always try Technorati.com. They’ve improved considerably since a year ago.
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I’ve been getting these kind of referrals like everyone else here. Just today I’ve had referrals from spam-filtering-service.net (I’m sure there’s an irony in this somewhere, but I don’t get the joke).
Do you have to be a member of Technorati to do this? And how do you go about tracking legit links? Thanks in advance.
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Same thing here lumiglow(the rest of the url obscured) and hot-info-2u.b(the rest of url obscured)
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Sounds like we’re all getting the same bogus links – so it’s a safe bet others are also finding myfreecreditreports, drugrehabscrap, tipstohairremoval & nowetv among ‘referrers’. Am also getting false Facebook & Twitter links. Like Cheekycici, all my blogstats have gone completely haywire for the past fortnight. Would love to know if there’s any way of getting rid of these distortions. Have tried disabling comments + pings on all posts; but that’s probably far too late, now (damage linked somehow to ping or trackbacks?).
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