Surge of Followers

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  eileenanddogs · Member · Sep 1, 2013 at 1:39 am

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  This is not in any way a problem. It’s wonderful, but I am curious. My blog is aimed at a very small “niche” audience (dog training). It was featured in Freshly Pressed back in July. I had a surge of followers, including some apparently from outside my niche. But the surge never quite died down. Now it is on the increase again. I am getting more and more followers, most of them apparently not “dog people.” Many of them have very commercial names (e.g. names with “ezine” in them but no posts).

  I would love to think that this is all because of my amazing writing (wink) but I keep wondering if the followers get something else out of it. Are they heeding some advice about following lots of blogs? They never comment so they are not making any kind of “presence.”

  Again, not a complaint. Just wondering if there is some hidden value for all these followers.

  Thanks for any responses to my curiosity.

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

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  timethief · Member · Sep 3, 2013 at 9:49 pm

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  Many of them have very commercial names (e.g. names with “ezine” in them but no posts).

  I’m sorry but we cannot delete the individual likes others leave on our posts even those that are from obvious like button spammers. All we can do is what’s here.
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/likes/#likes-and-your-site

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  eileenanddogs · Member · Sep 3, 2013 at 9:57 pm

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  Thanks timethief! I don’t mind, just curious. I can see where the people who press the Like button get a little exposure. But I don’t know what the people who Follow get out of it if they aren’t interested.

  Thanks for your answer.

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  timethief · Member · Sep 3, 2013 at 10:00 pm

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  A WordPress.com account and a gravatar account are one in the same.

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  namibsands · Member · Sep 12, 2013 at 3:33 pm

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  Timethief, if “a WordPress.com account and a Gravatar account are one and the same”, then why can I not use the report spam option via http://en.wordpress.com/report-spam/ to report a gravatar that is clearly linked to a spam follower?

  I have about 20 new followers on my blog (http://flatkathy.wordpress.com/), all of whom are clearly of the ‘make money blogging / internet entrepreneur / SEO expert’ fraternity. As it seems that WordPress won’t allow me to delete them as followers (which is what most of us would like, based on the dozens of forum posts I’ve read so far), I’d at least like to report them.

  I think you said somewhere there was a ‘report’ function on the Gravatar, but I cannot find it for any of them. I’ve logged into my own Gravatar to see if there is a report option, but there isn’t.

  Some of them have more than one website, but none of the websites seems to be a WordPress.com blog that I could flag on the navigation bar at the top. I don’t want to click on all their websites, as that would just generate traffic, which is (presumably) what they want.

  When I enter the name of the Gravatar and/or the website on http://en.wordpress.com/report-spam/, it says “You’ve reached complaints for the free blogs hosted at WordPress.com. The site you’ve indicated is not running on WordPress.com.”

  So what options do I have?