Dealing With Referrer Spam

Image via CrunchBaseAgain, this blog post might insult the intelligence of people out there who know their way around a command prompt. The rest of you who are lost when it comes to technical affairs, please read on. You're among friends.

Many of my readers are starving writers themselves who are also running author blogs. You may have noticed  a plethora of websites that are supposedly linking to your blog. They clearly aren't, and most of them are sites that contain questionable content. That, ladies and gentlemen, is referrer spam. In the eyes of search engines crawling your blog, those websites have links on your site. This boosts their ranking in that search engine, and a good time is had by all.

Well, all but you, of course. From what I can tell, it won't hurt your blog or its reputation at all. It is merely annoying, and makes it incredibly difficult to see who is actually viewing your blog. Not to mention that, if you're anything like me, you're probably feeling a bit used.

Blogger is famous for referrer spam. This is a well known fact, and while it can be annoying, using Google Analytics instead of trusting Blogger Statistics can fix the problem. When I get a new traffic source that I haven't already identified as just plain old referrer spam, however, I usually click on it to see if it is, in fact, real. Most of the time it turns out to be the same old referrer spam as before, but it's still worth a try...sort of. Today I linked clicked a link that looked legitimate to see if it was referrer spam and saw a message that said something along the lines of, "If you create a premium account with us, you might see your links in our private section, which is probably where they were linked from."

Not really. I paraphrased, so those quotations don't really belong, but it just looks better that way, doesn't it?

I couldn't help but feel insulted. I'm not that stupid; I know you're referrer spam, silly.

If you're getting as tired of referrer spam as I was, it would be a good idea to sign up for a free account with Google Analytics. From what I've noticed so far, it doesn't seem to pick up the referrer spam when it shows your traffic sources, giving you the sites that are actually linking to you and not showing the ones that aren't.

 And if you do click on one of these links in  your traffic sources, for the love of all that is holy, don't sign up for anything to get access to some "special area" of their website where they say they actually are linking to your blog. Believe me when I say that they aren't.

I've also heard talk about some sort of "nofollow" tag thing that might work, and am planning on asking my boyfriend just what it is and whether or not I should use it. Apparently a lot of people hate it, but they seem mostly to be  Black Hats. I'll give you guys a followup on that as soon as I can.



***If you're using Google Analytics and have noticed it actually picking up on and showing the referrer spam, let me know that, too! Oh, and don't be stupid like me and click on the links to the spam site. They'll enjoy the traffic.