Unusual number of new followers
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I know this topic came up a couple of years ago, but it seems to happen in waves: my blog, which supposedly doesn’t show up on search engines, has suddenly gotten a number of new followers within the past month, most of them relatively recent WordPress bloggers. Most of them are from the Middle East and South Asia; a few aren’t even written in English, so I can’t even read the content. (Yes, I know I can use Google Translate in Chrome to decipher them, but it begs the question: what do they see in my blog?) Some of them are evidently promoting a business or product (“Please visit my eBay store”); others are literary or political. A couple have not been updated in a year or two, which makes me wonder if they’re been hacked.
My question is, does WordPress encourage newer bloggers to follow/”like” other bloggers in order to get more followers? And is there some way to screen followers, outside of making one’s blog completely private? My blog is primarily a family newsletter: I started it when my kids went off to college and I found it time consuming to email them with updates about friends, relatives and the old neighborhood. (This was before Facebook, which I detest.) I still have elderly relatives who follow it; I don’t want to make it harder for them to read a post by making them use a password. At the same time, it seems odd that a complete stranger would be interested in my work rants and my cat.
Suggestions? Am I being excessively paranoid?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there, unfortunately, this has been an ongoing issue with Likes.
If you don’t want to make your site Private (really the best solution to this issue) so your older family members can easily visit your site, ask yourself whether you really need to have Likes enabled? Once Likes are removed from your site, the incentive for spam Likes is gone. (If you have the time and are so inclined you can also report abusers on Gravatar.)
Are these questionable accounts also Following your site? If so, you can remove them under Manage>People in your site’s dashboard. Being a Public site however means they can just re-follow your site.
Hope that helps.
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Thank you for your suggestions! Some of the bloggers are just “liking” odd posts, but the majority are following my blog. I hadn’t thought of disabling the Like button, mainly because these same older relatives prefer using “likes” than leaving comments.
I wish WordPress had a filter similar to Flickr, where one can make certain photos visible only to designated “Family & Friends.” I realize this isn’t going to keep out all of the spammy follows, but some of those odd “Likes” are on posts discussing family events, topics I wouldn’t think a casual outside reader would be interested in. Years ago I was stalked and harassed on another blogging platform; while that blog is shuttered and most of the contacts from that time have disappeared or wandered off to Facebook, I still worry on occasion about that person returning.
I’ll also fiddle with the account settings and see if I can remove some of the more questionable follows. I guess it’ll have to be like weeding a garden, where one has to be persistent and patient.
I’ve also noticed that some of these bloggers follow blogs that I follow, and where I sometimes leave comments. I may have to be more careful about where I leave comments, since these seem to encourage people to follow me. Which is sometimes good, but right now, seems disturbing.
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I hadn’t thought of disabling the Like button, mainly because these same older relatives prefer using “likes” than leaving comments.
Just a thought here.
If your older family members leave Likes, then they already need to be logged in to a WordPress.com account in order to click the Like button. This being the case, then you might consider making your site Private and inviting them to view it. They already have your site address. :) And making your site Private will keep out unwelcome visitors.
https://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/#viewer
https://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/#adding-and-removing-viewers-on-a-private-siteLet us know if you have any other question about this.
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Thanks! The main issue is the strange bump in follows from bloggers I’ve never seen or heard of before. I’ll think about making my blog private, but I’m going to leave this question open for a few more days to see if other WordPress members have had this problem recently.
It’s strange how this issue always come in a wave: for months, things are sleepy and status quo; then suddenly, I get a dozen new follows. These other blogs mostly look legit, but again there’s that question of ‘why follow this blog when we appear not to have anything in common?’ A friend who develops websites gave me a long explanation about ‘crawler bots scraping the internet for data,’ but I don’t think it’s as sinister as that. It seems more like, ‘I followed you, so I expect you’ll follow me back.’
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