Beginning about a month or so back, I started to get a little verklempt; my blog page views were numbering about 85k and I was looking forward to hitting 100k later this year. Then a funny thing happened this week. Not funny, really, as much as aggravating, annoying, irritating, and just plain F'd up—my blog became the victim of referer spam.
If you don't know what that is, it's okay. In fact, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept. It's a spamdexing trick where BS sites try to piggyback search engine placement off my URL. Over the course of a couple of days, the damn spammer jacked up my page views by 15-18k and topped the 100,000 mark. It took me 2-1/2 years to build up those 85k vies, and in two F'ing days, the spamfracker cracked my 100,000 mark. Thanks, assjack!
The good news is, it appears they gave up on my URL when they realized I've done too good of a job indexing my own blog with the search engines through the power of effective keywords on most of my posts (something I actually plan a post on in the near future), and they probably didn't get the placement they were hoping for. The bad news... my 100,000th page view wasn't really my 100,000th page view. Funnily enough, it only hit the home page counts of the blog and didn't seem to jack too much with the counts of the individual posts.
So where does that leave me? Tracking the things that matter... the number of followers, the number of posts I've made, and the number of hits to those individual posts.
To those of you who aren't eggsucking spamslappers... thank you for your support.
Same happened to me.
ReplyDeleteAh I had the same thing happen a year or 2 ago. I never worked out what it was (assumed it was a blogspot bug), but looks like the same phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteYeah, my blog's being mauled by the referral spam at the moment. I estimate nearly 80% of traffic over the last month is from referral spammer scumbags (or their bots I guess).
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