Referrer Spam

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  francisgrillo · Member · May 22, 2011 at 8:51 pm

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  I keep being visited from people whose referrer is the same site every time: [spam referrer removed]. In this site I see no link to my blog, so I think it’s just spam. In my “Site Stats” section though, I can’t see the original URL of the “guilty” site [spam referrer removed], but I just can see several redirecting urls to it (for example [spam referrer removed]). It’s getting rather annoying. I know that this is obviously not your fault: I just wanted to know if there is a solution to this problem (or at least if there is a temporary one).

  Thank you for your amazing blogging platform.
  ~ F. Grillo
  Blog url: http://francisgrillo.wordpress.com/

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  andrewspittle · Staff · May 22, 2011 at 8:58 pm

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  Hi, thanks for letting us know about this. What you’ve been running into is called “Referrer Spam.” It’s a relatively new type of spam and an unfortunate side effect of the way statistics tracking works.

  Spammers use 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.

  We’re working on filtering these all out of stats pages so if you run into more spam referrers feel free to send in a private support request and we’ll get the URLs taken care of. Thanks!