The new year has hardly begun and a new spammer has shown up: videoshub . needz . it. From the spelling, I can only surmise that it is a link to tawdry materials of a graphic nature. It is highly suggested you do not click on it if you find it in your Blogger stats.
Reviews of movies, anime, and the occasional TV show mixed with warnings on Blogger spam. Also to be found are musings on whatever I am thinking about - all from the point of view of being left to watch everything from the sidelines of life.
19 comments:
Spam spam spam spammity spam spam spam!
Thanks for the tip! I definitely learned real quick not to click on those referral sites.
You never get anything good from spammers. I didn't even get eggs and bacon with my spam, sigh.
This PSA was brought to you by the number 1066 which has been providing charitable aid to Normans for almost one thousand years.
Just give days into 2013 and my Blogger blog has already had five visits from the URL you mentioned in your article.
I'd like to know how long it takes Blogger to block referral spammers. I mean, my blog isn't particularly popular so I can only assume that that URL has visited thousands of blogs. How hard would it be to automate the detection when its behavior is that obvious?
Congrats! Your blog is the #1 result on Google when you enter: http://videoshub.needz.it/
My blog is for movie reviews, so when I saw "video", I thought maybe it was a legit site referring people to mine. I haven't actually gone there to check it out though. I found your post first. Thanks for the head's up.
Shane
Neosimian -- That's a good question. One would think it would be easy for them.
I've noticed that after several months, some of the spam referrals stop showing in the stats, but I still see hits from Russia that don't show up in Analytics or StatCounter. So Google is doing something incomplete in stopping the spammers in addition to being slow.
Supercords -- Glad to be of service. It's a sad thing to be number one for warning people on something, but hey I'm not that great a writer. I started posting about referral spammers because there were so few sources explaining the strange links I was seeing. That's if I found anything at all other than web traffic reports!
Thanks for the tip. I saw it the other day and it always seems to be 5 hits. What happens if you click on it?
Clare -- It is a link to a porn site. I loaded up a virtual machine with Linux to check it out and OpenDNS filtered it out for pornography.
OpendDNS is a service that replaces who you use to translate web urls to actual addresses and can be set up to filter what is accessible. I use it for a first layer of web browsing security.
Thanks for your help - I was wondering why a site in Italy would be interested in my blog about autism courses!
I have a bunch of referrals from this link, and figured something was up. Can anyone explain what a referral spammer is?
Mary -- Referral spam or referer spam is the practice of inserting false referring links into websites statistics in the hope you will click on them. Since it can be exciting to get linked to especially for a small blog the odds of people clicking to check who linked to them is pretty high.
The links usually take you to a site with malware, pornography, or massive amounts of ads. All of this is about making money fraudulently with most tracing back to Russia. Organized crime groups are often behind it, but individuals can be too.
Wikipedia has a very short entry on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam
Blogger seems to be very vulnerable to this kind of attack. If you use Google Analytics or another statistics provider, you rarely see any of it because they aren't as vulnerable or filter it out.
I got that too and clicked it. Now I feel so dumped
I found it as well. Seems to be one of my high tracking sources. Anyone know a way to block it?
Aww. So this whole time I thought my little mommy blog was of great interest to the Russian people.
Okay, not really. Thanks for the info.
Alicia -- Sad to say there isn't a way to in Blogger. But if you sign up with one of the trackers I mentioned and add their code to your blog template, the stats they'll give on their sites will filter out almost all the spam.
Anon Mommy Blogger -- Who knows, maybe a few of them are legit. I've gotten real hits from Russian readers in the past, so they aren't all bots. Though with their declining birth rates...
i ended up clicking on it because I didn't recognize it as spam! urgh!
I've click on it. Should I clean up my PC?
Mel and Lois -- I suggest deleting your cookies and cache contents in your browser settings. This means you will have to re-enter passwords for websites, but it is a minor inconvenience.
Also, it would be wise to run a malware removal program such as Spybot SD to make sure nothing came in through javascript. These anti-malware programs are pretty good at removing bad cookies too. That is something you should do on a regular basis since even large corporates sites have had malware inserted at times.
If you are really, really worried, you could use CCleaner, but it tends to nuke a lot of things you'd probably prefer to keep.
Thanks for the great Information. Its really a spam !!! Be careful guys!!!!!
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