Referrer denies me permission to its link

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  piedmontgardener · Member · May 2, 2011 at 5:37 pm

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  Today in my referrer’s list was a link to a site that creates content for a fee. It appears that a link from one of their articles links to my blog, but when I clicked on the link to discern more, their site said I didn’t have permission to look.

  Because this company is in the business of creating and selling content, I’d like to be sure they aren’t “borrowing” mine. I’ve written to the only email address I could find on their site, but they have not replied.

  Do you know of any way that I can determine the nature of this company’s referral to my blog?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  timethief · Member · May 2, 2011 at 6:38 pm

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  I did a forum search. Here are the results.

  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-548475

  These 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 .

  Contact

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  raincoaster · Member · May 2, 2011 at 10:39 pm

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  If I were you I’d google the site and business name and if you find remarks about it on Facebook or some public forum, drop a comment there to this effect, saying you want to be sure they’re neither referral spammers nor content thieves. Any responsible business has to respond to something like that.