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Spam visits are still counted, even after referrers have been removed

  1. sanchomccann
    Member

    WordPress.com support is generally quick (within a couple of days) to remove spam referrers from the referrer list. However, the visits that those referrers generated are still in my visit counts for those days, even after 13 days. Why aren't these handled at the same time? Why are the visits still skewing my stats? That's the main reason I report the spam referrers, since I'm never going to click on the referrer link, I only care that my stats are skewed.

    The blog I need help with is sanchom.wordpress.com.

  2. ojcausley
    Member

    I just messaged the contact support about the same matter.
    It bothers me that my site stats are not accurate which doesn't exactly inform me of how many people have actually looked at my site.
    Do the stats get alterted eventually?

  3. bibliophage91
    Member

    Same here.
    My stats are still absurdly inflated after a couple weeks since I started reporting the spam referrals, I am sure my visit count has never dropped although spam referrers have been removed. In terms of knowing visits in a day, this is *worse* because I can no longer see how many visits were due to the spam.

  4. ivanovitch
    Member

    I've been getting a lot of that recently too.

  5. timethief
    Member

    There is a sticky post at the head of the forum. Iin case you have not read it here's the link. http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/regarding-referrer-spam?replies=1
    Staff:

    Thanks for reporting this - we are aware of this problem and are working hard to find a solution to fix it.

    Some background: what you're experiencing is called "Referrer Spam", and it's 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.

    In the meantime, you can rest assured that there is no security risk here, to you or to you blog. It's just an annoyance, but one we will hopefully be able to get rid of very soon.
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/tons-of-hits-from-spam-domain?replies=29#post-548475

    These spam referrers do not in any way affect your blog's Google page ranking.

    1. Do not click the links.
    2. Do not post the URL or names of the site into forum threads.
    3. Report all spam referrals to Staff directly .
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/

    In case you are interested there are non-Javascript third party stats programs we can use as well.

  6. sanchomccann
    Member

    I'm not complaining about new spam referrers. The sticky post does not address my problem.

    My issue is that even though the spam referrers are removed from the "Referrers" section of my stats board, the views that they generated are still in the view count for my site. For example, April 4 still shows that I had 55 views, even though like 30 of those were from spam referrers which have since been removed from the "Referrers" section.

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