WP referrer spam blacklist (fight 2040+ Referrer Spammers in (Google/Matomo) Analytics)
List of spammers in FAQ.
No need for configuration! Plugin in background redirects referral spammer to blank page ( about:blank ). Redirect link can be altered via filter wp_referralblock_redirect_uri.
NO auto update, as we see that as possible as security hole. We do not wan’t Your site to get hacked.
Plugin is for sites that can’t edit their .htaccess or configure NGINX or Apache servers.
Via my LinkedIN post: Few months ago I started to collect referral spam pages in private file un bitbucket.org. Problem was that I did not know all spammers. Then, few weeks ago, I found that Matomo (Open source analytics) started their own “project”, and they did the same thing I did – collected referral spam sites to block them from Your website.
On my own server I do that at server level, but some of my clients have hosting, where You can not edit server settings. This week I came up with another solution – WordPress plugin “WP referrer spam blacklist”. I will update list every week from Matomo’s community-contributed list of spammers.
If You have WordPress site and no knowledge about or access to server settings, I made that for You!
From Wikipedia:
Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer
bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed
at search engines). The technique involves making
repeated web site requests using a fake referer URL
to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that
publish their access logs, including referer statistics,
will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site.
These links will be indexed by search engines
as they crawl the access logs.
This benefits the spammer because the free link improves
the spammer site's search engine ranking owing
to link-counting algorithms that search engines use.
Other plugins by author: itemprop WP for SERP/SEO Rich snippets – Add schema.org itemprop code to the (custom) post content for search engines and bots for better SERP results