Saturday 2 November 2013

Spam Referral Sites

I was all excited when I checked my blog's stats today and saw I'd received over 1,000 hits yesterday. "Finally, broke the 1000 hits/day barrier and hit a milestone!", I thought.

Then I checked traffic sources and saw this

Yesterday's referral hits

Most of the hits yesterday weren't hits from real readers, they were just garbage hits from Spam Referral sites. I thought I was finally rid of them a few weeks ago but they suddenly showed up on my stats again today.

I really wish they'd go away and stop messing up everyone's stats like this.

For other bloggers who may not know I'd like to point out that one of the worst things you can do regarding spam referrals is to click the spam referral links on your own stats page. That's exactly what they're looking for, clicks, the more you click on their link, the more garbage hits they send back your way.

The clicks aren't on a 1 to 1 basis either, for every click you do they'll send back hundreds of fake hits.

5 comments:

  1. So are you saying, that in the entirety of this blog, far less than 1000 humans have actually made the effort to read your work?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No those are per day stats.

      I've edited the post to make that clear.

      Delete
    2. Sadly, I think I can count the total number of human readers of my blog on the fingers of one hand. Ah well... writing about what I do has done wonders for my PvP skill.

      Delete
    3. It's really only a guess but I'd say I have about 100 readers. 10 - 20 are regular readers and most of those are other bloggers.

      Whenever I post a new article I get around 300 - 400 hits over the next 24 hours and another 100 a day for the next few days. When I post a new article every day for a few days it goes up to 500 - 600 hits a day.

      Probably about half of those hits are spam referrals. For the real hits from actual readers, the same person will often read several pages, generating several hits.

      Delete
  2. Surely I count for a dozen hits so thats two hands already ....

    ReplyDelete