Trashy referrer spammers keep sending links
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Well, just a few weeks into WordPress and it looks like I’ll have to shut down my blog unless someone can kindly tell me how to take out the trashy links that are showing up in the referrer section. I noticed elsewhere on the forum that it was suggested we contact support with a list of these links. Where’s support?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Thanks. It is amazing to me how many of these have appeared in a short period of time – last couple of day. The blog is new and I think I’ve had more spam referrers than real visitors to the blog! :)
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That’s typical, actually. As soon as search engines find your blog, so do spammers.
Once staff is back on the 16th, send them a list of ALL the spam referrals you’ve gotten.
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@bridgingcenturies — Referrer spam is 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.
It’s really annoying, but there is no security risk here to you or your blog. We hope to deploy a permanent fix soon.
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I have some referrer spam links also – should I keep them and report them, or should I just wait for the fix? :-)
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Thanks for all the responses. Since “blogging” is a new activity for me, it’s nice to know what to expect as “normal” on the technical end.
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Keep them and report them on the 16th. Staff have to have feedback in order to know which are spam and which aren’t.
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The staff now say they will be out until 19 Sep 2010. I understand they are working on this referrer spam problem. It seems to me that a good solution might be a plug-in that would block the spammers. I believe there used to be one. If I can find any solution, I will post it here.
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Just did a post and within minutes got over 30 spam referrals from just one website. It really is making my stats section meaningless. How about some way to mark a link as spam and so ignore it. If everyone did that it’d be a good way to create a master list of sites to ignore, and we’d all benefit from it collectively.
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I agree about the amount of referrer spam that’s been showing up… it’s made the “Referrer” list absolutely useless.
@chenocetah – you’re right there is a plug-in to blog referrer spam, but it only works on “self-hosted” WordPress blogs and not on WordPress.com blogs.
I’ve been submitting every referrer spam URL that shows up in my dashboard to Support… I suggest that everyone else do that also. That may give WordPress support enough URL’s to build some type of blacklist.
My question is: Isn’t there some way support can implement something similar to “Akismet” which blocks spam comments?
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BTW… I just did some quick checking and found out that Referrer SPAM also skews your visitor stats in the WordPress dashboard.
I use two other stat counting systems to track visitors, and since the Referrer SPAM has increased there has also been a larger discrepancy between the number of “hits” my WordPress dashboard shows and what my other stat counters show – with the WordPress stats showing more hits than the other two do. And guess what? The number of “hits” in WordPress is higher by roughly the same number of Referrer SPAM links.
So, if you’re using the WordPress stats to track the number of hits, you’ll have to subtract the number of Referrer SPAM links to get a more accurate count.
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