Friday, August 9, 2013

Referrer Spam

I'm starting to hate what is called "referrer spam."  Look at this screen capture of my stats from a couple of days ago (August 5th):

As you can see, something called "r-e-f-e-r-e-r.com" gave me 101 pageviews.  That is referrer spam.  In fact, of the four "entry" sources listed, the only one I know is not referrer spam is my own website.

On my old (paid) blog I never had referrer spam that I noticed.  Yes, I'd have comment spam but even that was filtered out pretty well.  It seems what the referrer spam people hope is you have on your blog your best referrers and then people who come to your blog will see that and click the link.  And that sends them to a porn or scam or virus-installing website.  The thing I hate about referrer spam is it distorts my pageviews so I have no idea who is really looking at my blog.

In an attempt to stop getting referrer spam, I have removed the pageview counter on this blog.  Maybe their bots will see I don't post anything about pageviews or referrers and stop spamming me.  Well, that's the hope (hasn't worked so far).  You'd think the geniuses at Google would come up with a way to block it.  But so far, no soap.

I guess it's just another annoyance of the internet these days.

UPDATE: I just noticed at the bottom of each blog post a "Links to this post" link.  So I took that out and maybe that will solve the problem.   I never realized that was there since it is in the Blogger default setup.

UPDATE 2: I got rid of that "Links to this Post" thing and the referrer spam has seemed to completely go away!

UPDATE 3: I thought I killed the referrer spam, but it has come roaring back. I guess there's no solution. Come on, Google, figure out a way to fight this stuff!

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