Suspicious link
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Hi,
I get WP notices in my Gmail for “likes” and “follows”… When I opened a WP notice for a new follower, I got a notice that it is a suspicious link… The supposed address for the follower was “coaching.cf”… In my media folder, you can see three Print Screens I took regarding this incident… One is of the “follow” gmail notice, the second is of my WP Reader page, and the third is of my WP stats page at my website.
On that third Print Screen, it shows my blog’s address as a “Referrer”… How can that be? Is there a connection between the “Referrer” and the suspicious link in the gmail notice?
Thank you for taking care of everyone writing for WordPress… You are all greatly appreciated.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
The link that appears in notifications and in the emails is whatever a particular person chooses to list as their website URL in Account Settings:
https://wordpress.com/me/account/
That field takes any valid URL – it doesn’t have to be a WordPress.com site – and we don’t check or monitor in any way what people add there.
I don’t see any warnings from either my browser or antivirus software if I visit http://coaching.cf/ directly, so this warning appears to be coming specifically from Gmail – probably that link has been reported to Google at some point, causing them to flag it in this way. It doesn’t necessarily mean the site is dangerous to visit.
On that third Print Screen, it shows my blog’s address as a “Referrer”… How can that be? Is there a connection between the “Referrer” and the suspicious link in the gmail notice?
There is no connection between that referrer in your stats and the warning you get in Gmail for the completely different site.
You’ll notice that isn’t a link to your site itself, but to 123hallelujah.files.wordpress.com, which is a media file URL. Normally that URL will have extra information added at the end, like a date and the file name of a media file in your library.
Without that info added, that link just redirects to your site’s home page, and that caused the link to be recorded as a referrer.
Most likely someone who doesn’t really understand how media on a WordPress site works, thought using that link would allow them to view your published images directly rather than in the posts where they appear. I wouldn’t be concerned about that.
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Kokkieh,
Thank you for getting back to me and clearing up those concerns… I really appreciate that.
Another concern I forgot to mention is in the Print Screen of my stats page… There is such a HUGE difference between the number of visitors as compared with the number of views… That doesn’t make any sense… Whether that was the result of one person’s views or a number of people’s views, it doesn’t seem normal…
Might someone have fallen asleep on their keyboard and accidentally scrolled through a bunch of posts?……. Thank you for your expertise in what confuses this old lady… … : )
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Hi again,
Another thing I forgot to mention is that when one looks at the map on the stats page, that whole jump of views seems to be coming from India… That also seems like an unlikely happening…
Have a great day!
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Hi there,
I took a look and the stats seem okay. It’s entirely possible someone in India found your site and liked it enough to read several posts, or maybe even shared posts with a friend there who also viewed several.
I have a site with a lot of old posts, too, and sometimes someone will just read through several at a time. My stats tend to look like that when they do. :) Nothing to worry about. Everything looks pretty normal there.
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