One of the banes of blogging is link referral spam that is only visible to the website’s administrator, or in this case, the owner of the blog. Much of it comes from Russia and I note the rare occasions when a legitimate search from there lands on my blog. 99% of hits on the blog from Russia are from spammers.
The latest to come out of there is falsified links from aptratings . com, which poses as apartmentratings.com which is a real site of questionable reliability, but no spammer. They do this by having a banner link to the real site on top, but the content is a come on to make money by clicking on links or pushing links on social media sites. I suspect the fake site content changes from time to time, but do not want to waste time finding out.
The only ones making money off this are the people running that site in Russia, so do not fall for it. I have seen novice bloggers online getting excited to get linked to without realizing what it is really about. Sorry to burst your bubbles, but they randomly scour blogger looking for people to sucker in.
Then there are the post spammers, which is why you need to enable reviewing post before they are put up. One got by me this week when I missed with the mouse cursor and had to go delete it. Forget idle hands, shaky hands are really the devil’s plaything.
You will not get a virus from clicking on the referral spam, but you most likely will get more of it showing up in your stats in the control panel.
3 comments:
Yup, I've noticed the same thing in my analytics. Thanks for the explanation.
Thank you!! I was wondering what was going on! I like your blog btw, and will visit again.
Glad to be of help, I posted about it because there wasn't a lot out there about this particular scam.
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