When I started publishing on this blog and others years ago, I was initially gratified to see in the statistics referrals from certain sites. Of course, my vanity was punished when I discovered that these sites had nothing at all about my posts.
Some searching showed it's a practice called referer spam. No human has actually read your post for those hits. A web bot has fetched your page, but supplied a fake referral URL. So when you look at your statistics you think somebody has linked to you. You click on the link and the spammers get another page view.
The most blatant fake referrals had query terms promoting dubious products. The less blatant ones had query terms with a unique ID that let the site know you had clicked on the link. And serve up some spam after that. Some spammers used URL shorteners to conceal the source of the fake referral. At some point about a third of my "hits" were from Russia. I don't think I have that many readers there, even though I provide a translation button. Also it seems they have a way of detecting when a new blog has started up so they can target a fledgling blog. After I had published the last post of a travel blog, they lost interest in my blog.
What can you do about these fake hits? Basically nothing. Just ignore the fake hits in your statistics. Don't click on the links. Don't reward them with traffic.
By the way it isn't just the Russians doing it, there is one Korean site that attempts to get page views this way. Also some spammers use servers or hijacked PCs in the US to make it look like the hits came from there.
Some searching showed it's a practice called referer spam. No human has actually read your post for those hits. A web bot has fetched your page, but supplied a fake referral URL. So when you look at your statistics you think somebody has linked to you. You click on the link and the spammers get another page view.
The most blatant fake referrals had query terms promoting dubious products. The less blatant ones had query terms with a unique ID that let the site know you had clicked on the link. And serve up some spam after that. Some spammers used URL shorteners to conceal the source of the fake referral. At some point about a third of my "hits" were from Russia. I don't think I have that many readers there, even though I provide a translation button. Also it seems they have a way of detecting when a new blog has started up so they can target a fledgling blog. After I had published the last post of a travel blog, they lost interest in my blog.
What can you do about these fake hits? Basically nothing. Just ignore the fake hits in your statistics. Don't click on the links. Don't reward them with traffic.
By the way it isn't just the Russians doing it, there is one Korean site that attempts to get page views this way. Also some spammers use servers or hijacked PCs in the US to make it look like the hits came from there.
