October 7, 2011

Unknown or strange URLs in Blogger Stats

You are a blogger of sorts and your favourite pastime is to endlessly stare at your Blogger Stats hoping that hits will keep on coming if you just sit there and look at it, like me! And as you are looking at your "countless" number of less than 100 clicks and hits and unique views on your blog, you come across strange URLs that claim to refer your blog to people. Not bad, you think and click on the referrer link to see which is this benevolent site that sends you a lot of traffic! Ya, referrer spammers win!

Referrer Spam, which is also known as Log Spam or Referrer Bombing, is the act of "using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise." This practice started as Blogging became popular. Bloggers, in their endless quest for 'link love', started publishing the sites that send them referrals. Some of them automated the process and linked the referrer list to the Analytics they used. Now, that encouraged spammers to send referrer spam so that the link of the site they wanted to advertise gets listed in a Blogger's Referrer List.

Bloggers with a lot of visits to their Blogs may not see these Referrer Spam often, as Referrer Spammers or Log Spammers send less than 20 to 25 automated hits to a Blog so that they will not get caught by Spam Fighting Teams of different Tech Companies. But those of us who drive less than hundred people a day to our Blogs will notice them immediately and click  on whatever godforsaken links they are referring us to.

How can we prevent unknown or strange URLs or referrer spammers from attacking our Blogger Stats or Analytics Logs? Here are a few things you can do to keep referrer spammers at bay:

  1. Hide your statistics  and list of top referrers so that referrer spammers look elsewhere for their link baits. This way you can save people who visit your blog from clicking on links they are not supposed to.
  2. Use Web Analytics Sites you trust. Some of these Analytic Sites keep their stats open and help spammers analyze your web traffic to target you. They target you if you are a blogger who gets less than 100 visits a day
  3. If you are using Wordpress as your Blog Platform, you can use a plug-in called Referrer Bouncer. You can go to the Referrer Bouncer from here
  4. Those of you are using Blogger as you Blog Platform need to patiently wait and hope that Google will trace the Spammer one day and block him/her because he/she is sending too many automated requests to its servers. Until then, make sure that you do not publish your Blogger Stat and you do not click on any of those unfamiliar or suspicious URLs that claim to send you a lot of traffic. 

4 comments:

  1. still no solution so far from Blogger/Google to block such fake link referrers... Wish to hear from Google soon..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Me too. I wish Google could at least let me remove it from my stats log so I don't have to see it.

      I wonder if there is some place I can report the site.

      Delete

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