While there hasn’t been a lot of new spam hitting this blog (been a lot of vampirestats lately), there has been one showing up under two different links and one that showed up on another blogger’s site.
First up is the worst offender. Coming in as www . seoanalyses .com or under its real address, ourmeets . com , this is a pornographic “dating” site. As you can see, it was blocked by OpenDNS, which I use to pre-filter anything coming into the house. Don’t click on it as it is exceedingly unsafe to visit.
Next up is one that commenter Sarma listed.
kallery . net out of South Korea looks like a real site at first glance, but digging further reveals that it sends you off to other sites where art is for sale. That’s a traditional tactic of cross promoting links used to generate ad revenue or of black hat SEO to up search engine rankings. Appears relatively harmless, but I advise avoiding.
Notice the art quiz winners on the right hand sidebar of the first screenshot. What are the odds that four of them would be links promoting the site? The mind boggles!
I wonder what percentage of Web pages in the world are actually spam sites? The search engines have enough trouble keeping up with the legitimate content being put up.
22 comments:
I've been getting some traffic from "ourmeets" as well. I appreciate your helpful blog posts because they prevent the less knowledgeable from doing risky recon of these abominable excuses of a web site themselves.
OMG, thank you very much for letting us know this is a spam. I was scared to death after seeing traffic from this site with a specific URL. Whenever I get traffic from unknown sources, I try to type it in google to see if it is legit or not. I will either find out they are legit or will come across sites like this taht give me peace of mind. So I did not click on this link but I did I did the usual and typed it in google and saw a profile with my exact location on that site and was sick to my stomach and immediately removed my profile photo from my blog.Also removed my blog from web for sometime then I brought it back up because if people don't find a clean blog after clicking on that link from that site, they will associate my name with something bad.
"As you can see, it was blocked by OpenDNS, which I use to pre-filter anything coming into the house."
Can you please let me know how pre-filter? Would really appreciate it.
Artist and Anonymous - I'm glad to have been of help.
Shilpa - The details are at http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls/
Step one is signing up for the service and following the instructions to enable OpenDNS on your PC and/or router. I use the free version.
We pay a small fee to our internet service provider to have a static or fixed IP number which makes managing filtering a great deal easier.
Thank You.
I unfortunately clicked through to this disgusting site!! Can you advise on what I should do now please, as I want no association with this site?
Any help would be gratefully received?
Many thanks
Higgy
Higgy - All you can do is clear out your web browser's cookies and history, plus make sure any temporary files from around the time of the visit have been deleted.
I also advise scanning your system with an antivirus program such as Avast, AVG, or Microsoft Security Essentials if you are using Windows. A malware removal program such as Spybot Search and Destroy or MalwareBytes would be good to run also.
It isn't likely you have been infected, but it is better to be safe than sorry.
As far as being associated with the site, unless they harvested your IP address there shouldn't be an issue. Remember that the referral to your website is not actually real, but faked.
Thanks for this post. I did unfortunately click on the link as I wanted to see where my traffic was coming from, and it was horrible! So I did what you suggested to Higgy, cleared all history, temporary files and am running a scan.
I had one more question though, how do these sites create fake traffic, and is there anyway I can stop them from accessing the site?
Thanks
Linda - The fake referrals are created by forging the data that indicates where the hits come from either using a browser add on, separate application, or in some cases a bot net of infected PCs.
When a web browser loads a page, it isn't a one way street. It sends data indicating all sorts of things to the server the page resides on. That includes whether or not you loaded the page from a link somewhere else. So if that part is forged a server can be told a false address is where the visitor came from. Most of this is done by automated scripts, so it isn't some guy sitting at a keyboard loading websites all day. That's why we see spam referrals to sites that disappeared a long time ago.
There is nothing that can really be done about it except to complain to Google and ignore those false referrals. Google is slow to do anything about specific sites, preferring to shut down larger operations (mostly link farms selling linkbacks) by delisting them in their search engine.
I hope this answered your question!
This just happened to my blog as well from the our*me*ets site.
Is there any actual impact to simply having them do that?
I didn't click on it and I can see that they have left anything on the blog anywhere, nor does it appear to link to any specific posts.
Since this blog is just for a series of books I've written, I wouldn't want fans to have any impact of such a place coming there.
What do they, the faker, get out of making fake hits on a website?
Thank you.
Ann - From what I've been able to find out, there is no harm done to our blogs other than annoying us. Since they aren't true linkbacks, there are no search engine penalties for being associated with the spammers.
What motivates a site like ourmeets is profit. As much as many of us would like to believe that nobody would actually purchase a service or good from spam, there are enough people who do to make this profitable. It's been said that "a sucker is born every minute" and I'm afraid that is the truth.
Like you, I have my doubts about the profitability of spamming webmasters and blog writers. Perhaps this is a result of email filters getting better at cutting down the success rate of that kind of spam. Either there is some money to be had from suckers, or the spammers selling their services to the sites are conning them. If the site themselves aren't setting up the spamming, they are hiring others to do it for them.
It makes me think of another saying, "nobody can con a conman like another conman." We might just be collateral damage in a not so elaborate ripoff.
Sadly these are all only theories about why they bother with bloggers. Regardless, the spammers are a pest that we can't do a whole lot about except be informed and aware.
Patrick--thank you so much for your helpful commentary about these spammers. I've been hit with ilk like "ourmeets' pornographers recently and worried what impact they would have on my work. Is it that difficult for Google to do something about it? It's especially annoying for me--my blog is about early 20th century horror writers,(The R'lyeh Tribune). I often write about the author H.P. Lovecraft, and suspect I'm being misperceived by pornographers and their fans...
Sean - The good news is that these aren't true backlinks to your site, so there isn't anything connecting you to them that search engines would see. Only if they really linked to you would it be an issue.
I can see where the Lovecraft references would be misinterpreted, in fact I made a passing reference to H.P.'s work and had a visit from a search for porn. Other than search engines such as Google getting smarter in their algorithms, it'll be an annoying thing that will occasionally happen. Theoretically, the lack of click's and time spent on the poor matches will refine you out of those searches.
Still, it's aggravating enough that it makes me want to sick the Hounds of Tindalos on the spammers.
Thank you so much! I've had a lot of recent views by this ourme..., so I put their name in google and found your helpful blog answering questions. Certainly appreciate the information.
Pam - You're welcome!
Sorry i dont speak english verry good, i'm from Belgium, Europe
The problem with my blog is "Total page views" because the total is not good
thank you for your blog, I found it by doing a search on google by inserting the word "ourmeets", not to click on the link because I know it would be even worse
thank you for you blog!
http://www.vampirestat.com
http://ourmeets.com/0&c=303
Jean - I'm glad to have helped.
Thanks! Had really much traffic from Ourmeets... :-)
Hiya, I too keeping seeing ourmeets, vampirestats trafficking my page :(. I have read there is no possible way to get rid of these. :(
Congratulations twice Patrick. You have been able to help so many people (including me)with your analysis and reassurance. The second appreciation is for your SEO technique - otherwise we all couldn't have found the peace of mind your blog offers us.
Thanks & have a nice christmas.
Sarma
Patrick, What do you think of Akismet's protection against spam sites? My WordPress blog stats say that Akismet has protected me from about 1500 spam hits so far. Of course, since WordPress does not show traffic sources as Blogspot does, we can't be sure of what was filtered out. Your expert opinion when you're free please.
Johannes - You are welcome!
Charlotte - Don't let the false visits get you down. Keep on posting and real visitors will more than make up for it.
VeeVas - Thank you for the compliments and may you have a merry Christmas as well.
My SEO technique is nothing more than writing, more writing, and then some more writing. That and making sure the content of the first paragraphs relate directly to the title of the post. This is critical for search engines to know your post is about what it claims to be.
Of late, "ownership" credentials has become more important in Google's algorithm. Making sure your blog is linked to a Google + account is what they want you to do. Frankly, looking at what Google is doing in regards to its engine is like divining tea leaves, except less accurate.
On Askimet, I can't say much other than from doing a little reading on it it appears to be a useful tool for blocking spam. I wish we had something for it to plug into blogspot.
You might be able to cross reference statistics from a service such as Google Analytics or another hit counter. Of course, there will be discrepancies no matter what thanks to things such a NoScript.
If I'm recalling correctly, you have actual access to your logs with Wordpress. That would be the place to look for statistics but you'd be better off finding another Wordpress user familiar with the software. The obvious test would be to run your blog without Askimet for a while to see if it makes a difference.
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