Increase in spam referrer links?

  • mstigge · Member ·

    Since this weekend, (which is when Google, I believe, changed their algorithm to punish content farming), I have noticed a sharp uptick in ‘referrer’ traffic and the referring links appear to be spammy, content-farmy, ad delivery pages or the url is quickly deactivated because they are categorized as spam. Is this something others have seen? How do you fight this?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • auxclass · Member ·

    there are many threads in the forum about this, the staff is working on filtering them, your blog is in no danger at all, don’t click on the links or post them here, you can send the links to the staff to help them with their filtering.

    the spam comes and it goes, some people are up in arms over them and on the warpath (literally) – some sites see a lot of spam referrers others seem to get a small number.

    I have never figured out what “a ton of spam referrers” is for a real count – your stats get a bit distorted but since no two stats packages can agree on what your view count is it seems to be more of an annoyance than anything else.

  • bigshotprof · Member ·

    This is sort of depressing, because about 95% of my referrers seem to be from these sites, and that’s 95% of a pretty small number. :)

  • cocochanel75 · Member ·

    I report them daily, don’t click and everything etc etc. I wish I could get a clear explanation as to why some blogs are more attacked than others. Is it coincidence? Is the choice of topics? The blog’s title? The tags? Why is it getting worse?

    I wish WordPress would make an article on their blog explaining all this to the bloggers.

  • limberation · Member ·

    I report them daily too and I agree there seems to be an up surge in the last couple of days, but not nearly as bad as last month.

    I think WP are onto it really well.

    Is for tags, topics, etc misscappuccino, I have no idea – I wouldn’t think my subject matter particularly appealing to spammers, but I sure get my fair share!

  • timethief · Member ·

    Response from 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.
    https://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 .

    Contact

  • kateshrewsday · Member ·

    Hi, the support team isn’t around until 4 April and I’m having my stats inflated by two of these spam referrals.

    Is there some way we can block these referrals? They come from cz – is that czechoslovakia?

  • airodyssey · Member ·

    No, the Czech Republic. But it’s not relevant in my opinion, as spam could come from any country in the world.

    And you can now contact staff again the usual way:

    Contact

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