WordPress allows me to see statistics about “referrers” – the places that people came from before getting to my blog. This can be interesting, and potentially useful, information.
From time to time the referrer is the “WordPress Dashboard” – which I think means that my blog has appeared on the WordPress front page as one of the more popular blogs on wordpress.com. That’s a rather nice feeling. In fact some recent stats on WordPress say that it gets a little over 2 billion page views per month on 11.4 million blogs. Since my blog currently gets about 50,000 page views per month I’m responsible for about 1/40000 of the total page views … which is well above average.
There is a downside, though, to appearing on the WordPress dashboard – there seems to be an interesting correlation between the days I hit the WordPress dashboard and the days when I see spam comments climb to high values; fortunately Akismet manages to filter out almost all the spam, but I wonder if there are packages on the market that keep checking for popular blogs then automatically start generating spam comments on them.
But let’s move on to a more worrying referral: a couple of days ago the thing that appeared top of the list was a domain name starting with “freesexmovie”. I didn’t try clicking on it to discover what was at the far end – I took a guess, and I’m always a little paranoid about picking up viruses (of the computer kind) from strange web sites. I struggled, though, to find the connection between Oracle and something being free.
Is this another case of clever software finding popular blogs and creating local references to them, perhaps copying unusual words or phrases, so that search engines will lead unsuspecting readers to the wrong sites ?
There’s probably a suitable “bon mot” that I could quote for both these referral observations – but I can’t think of one at present.
I also have noticed incoming links from the “WordPress Dashboard” in my site’s statistics, and I am fairly certain that my blog is not nearly as popular as your blog. My best guess is that “WordPress Dashboard” is listed as the referred when, while a WordPress blog owner is reviewing the “Statistics” page for their site, they see an unknown site listed under the “Referrer” heading, and are curious to see why someone would link to their blog, so they open the link directly from the WordPress “Statistics” page.
I also have seen the odd referral sites. I suspect that this is a form of link spam, one that is not blocked by Akismet. Some sites list the top referring sites on their blog, so if a robot program “clicks” a link on a site multiple times the site will be added to the top referring sites list automatically – I think that the “Popular References” heading at the right of your blog pages lists the referring sites. To a search engine it might appear as though you have manually linked to the site when it appears in your “Popular References” list – I suspect that an entry in that list is almost as effective for improving site rankings in the search engines as a comment with the same spam link.
Comment by Charles Hooper — September 22, 2010 @ 10:28 pm UTC Sep 22,2010 |
a domain name starting with “freesexmovie”. I didn’t try clicking on it to discover what was at the far end – I took a guess, and I’m always a little paranoid about picking up viruses (of the computer kind) from strange web sites.
If you ever need assistance tracking down what is at the far end, just let me know.
Comment by Doug Burns — September 22, 2010 @ 10:40 pm UTC Sep 22,2010 |
It could well be that freesexmovie is a site based on an Oracle database whose administrator likes your blog
If it is true that most of the traffic of the web comes from sex related content, i imagine that the guys with enough money to spend on Oracle Enterprise Edition licenses could be them more than others.
On the other hand, the more the people talk about freesexmovie in the comments, the more likely is that you’ll have visitors in the future arriving here while searching for that.
Actually talking about sex could be a good way to “sex up” an oracle related blog.
I’ll think about it as i am making less than a half of your hits per month
Cheers
Comment by Flavio C. — September 23, 2010 @ 2:13 pm UTC Sep 23,2010 |
My Blogger Dashboard states that the top 3 Referring URLs are 3 pages from w w w get – insurance – quote com and the next 3 are 3 pages from w w w inexpensive furniture com.
A 3 letter word site ranks 7th !
Hemant K Chitale
Comment by Hemant K Chitale — September 23, 2010 @ 3:25 pm UTC Sep 23,2010 |
It is actually “Frees Ex Movie”.
It’s a site about a new Julia Roberts movie, “Jenny Frees Ex”, set for a Christmas release. It’s a heart-warming tale of (another) Erin Brockovich type of character, Jenny, who frees her ex from a Federal State penitentiary, because he has been wrongly convicted of rebuilding indexes unnecessarily.
Soundtrack available on CD in November.
Comment by Terry — September 24, 2010 @ 8:43 am UTC Sep 24,2010 |
Now that must be the the sequel (or prequel) to the one with Jennifer Aniston as the ex-wife of a bounty hunter (or Gerard Butler as the ex-husband of a reporter, depending on your point of view)
Comment by Jonathan Lewis — September 25, 2010 @ 8:47 am UTC Sep 25,2010 |
I can also confirm the “worrying part” of your referrers — if I take the viewpoint of a spammer, I find it quite an innovative idea to trick people into clicking a spoofed referral URL. But, because this mostly targets solely the blog owners and not the readers, I am also afraid that behind the referring site there might be malicious code that could try a hostile takeover of your blog.
This is not limited to wordpress only, I also found this on the social platform Xing and notified the admins of both sites. So far, there seem to be no countermeasures for this “link spam”.
It’s an interesting point you make in the correlation between rankings and spam. Although my blog gets far less traffic than yours, it sometimes appears as an “excellent blog” in its category. This could explain why on some days there’s much more spam to clean up.
> I struggled, though, to find the connection between Oracle and something being free.
))
Comment by oraculix — September 24, 2010 @ 9:28 am UTC Sep 24,2010 |
I finally worked that one out – free buffer waits and freelist contention.
Comment by Jonathan Lewis — September 25, 2010 @ 8:48 am UTC Sep 25,2010 |
Free XE Server?
@Flavio: Sad to say, sometimes the slightest reference to anything can cause corporate firewalls to reject your site. Naming a file “purity” and having a site on cox.net have bitten me.
Comment by joel garry — September 27, 2010 @ 11:20 pm UTC Sep 27,2010 |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam
If you can get at the raw http logs (which, of course, may or may not be possible), you may find that it’s just somebody doing SEO work. I see the same thing on a university site I manage- hundreds of requests with faked http_referer (sic) headers intended to make the sites in the faked headers seem more relevant to legit bots like google. I had to make the referrer section of our log analysis software private….
Comment by Keith — September 27, 2010 @ 5:19 pm UTC Sep 27,2010 |