Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Fight Spam, but how?

Been inundated with spammy referrers in the last few months. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I know what it is - backlink spam [1, 2], which means those dirty ad networks generating fake clicks to blogs, to be displayed in the backlink/trackback list, which in turn adds to their PageRank on Google. So wily are these spammers that instead of using their direct URL they are now masking it through t.co and then further wrapping them into StumbleUpon or Facebook or [insert any respectable sounding name] redirects. The blog owners will both be confused and curious - "Gee, who could be linking to me from http://www.filmhill.com/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FUEmjqui3"

Sadly, even though I have turned my backlinks off through Blogger settings, these guys won't stop. The TLDs are too diverse to block out. But one common pattern observed among these links are that all use t.co to masquerade. Probably could insert a JS snippet to block any incomings of this nature. But I don't see how that solves anything - Google Analytics will still register the referral since the page is going to be accessed and its going to show up anyways.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I have been getting this a lot. I have no idea why, it was worrying me though.

I came across this site,
and read this long and crazy post that had a bunch of those links that were in my traffic sources.

http://karen-rajabian.blogspot.com/

No idea what that has to do with me? But I have asked other bloggers if they have seen filmhil/ random stumbleupon links, and other weird ones in there Traffic Sources

Unknown said...

I just started my blog recently, Sherry, and I noticed those filmhill traffic sources, so I Googled them and here I am. They're probably responsible for MOST of my pageviews at this point, but dang, that ticks me off! I'd rather really know that people are reading what I write as opposed to guessing because some spammy person is hijacking my pageviews.

Preacher Rajabian said...
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