Referral Spam
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I have referral spam and I don’t know how to get rid of it! My site plan is free so I can’t download plugins … Is there any other way to get rid of the spam?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Could you please clarify what you mean by “referral spam”? Do you mean adverts? Adverts which pop-up and can’t be dismissed are not intended – are you perhaps being redirected to another website by any chance?
I’ve tagged WordPress.com staff to help you with this issue, but they may ask for the following details in order to try and track down the advert:
- Your device operating system and browser version
- The exact URL of the post/page where this advert appeared
- If redirected, the URL you were redirected to
- A screenshot of the advert
- Your IP address (please do not post that in a public forum, you can upload an image of it to your Media Library where only staff will be able to see it)
If you’re referring to something other than adverts, please let us know. :)
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They’re not ads, they’re fake views to my site. The stats section of my dashboard is just ballooning but I know it’s not real, the numbers are just too high!
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Hi there,
What exactly makes you think the views are fake, and where do you see spam referrals?
I can see a spike in your stats yesterday, but I can also see about 80 people visited your site after clicking a link on Facebook and another 23 people came from a link clicked on Instagram.
If you or someone else shared a link to your post and that lead to a large number of people visiting your site, it’s not spam. It’s what most bloggers hope will happen.
There is no way to prevent someone from sharing your posts on places like Facebook or Instagram, and there’s no way to prevent people from clicking on links shared on those sites and visiting your site.
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I think it’s spam because the numbers are just so much higher than my regular stats, and most of the views are from the US, and I don’t really know anybody there.
I was googling the issue last night and came across information like this, which is where I learned the term referrer spam:
“Referrer Spam is basically the spamming which is targeted at the Search Engines. It is done to pollute your analytics information so that they can improve their site ranking. The fake traffic promotes their domain in your website.”I just want my stats to be accurate and I’d like to prevent robots from visiting my site!
Thanks!
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This is not referral spam. Referral spam in the search engine context is when people place links back to their own site to try and game search ranking algorithms. That’s not what’s happening here – no one is adding links on your site to another site without your knowledge and permission.
What’s happening here is people clicking a link that someone shared on Facebook and visiting your site.
The fact that you don’t know anyone in the US is irrelevant. Your site can be discovered via Google or via the WordPress.com Reader by anyone, anywhere in the world. Anyone that finds your site can share a link on social media, in which case it’s their friends that will be visiting your site, as is most likely happening here.
This is how sites get new traffic, and most bloggers consider this a good thing.
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Okay, thanks! It’s just that I’d never seen such a sudden spike in views like that so I immediately got suspicious.
Since I guess I’m not in danger of bots, could someone on staff undo my marking Facebook as spam?
Thank you!
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I’d never seen such a sudden spike in views
Enjoy it while it lasts :)
Spikes like this don’t tend to last long, but if you’re lucky you might get a few dedicated new readers out of it.
I’ve unblocked Facebook from your spammed referrers, so it will show in your stats again. Also just a clarification – that spam button only prevents that specific referrer from appearing in your stats, but it doesn’t prevent them from linking to your site or people from reaching your site via such a links.
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