Spamming-Your Stats, Website, Blog and Social Media

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Spamming-Your Stats, Website, Blog, and Social Media

By Vickie J. Scanlon

Spamming can affect your stats, your website, your blog and even within your social media account. It can be a major nuisance for a webmaster or blogmaster, and, profitable for the spammer. I will discuss some of the most common, link bombing, referral spam, splogs, spam in blogs, and social networking spam.

Spamming-Is It Occurring On Your Blog or Website

Would be spammers do not hit your blog or website, just to be vicious, which I deem it is, but they also do it for profit. And if you have a fixed bandwidth that you have to adhere to from your web hosting service, it can cost you money or even shut your website or blog down until the costs are paid by you.

Here are some helpful hints to look for within your stats page.

1. Are you seeing a reoccurring IP address hitting your site (the hits are sometimes unrealistically out of proportion to the rest of the hits?)
2. Is a spider hitting your site and pulling data from your site without your permission?
3. Is a robot scraping your content?
4. Is a spider consuming your bandwidth? Or has your hosting service shut down your service because you are over your bandwidth, and they want more money?

Search Engine Spamming-Different Methods

Search engine spamming (spamdexing) main purpose is to disrupt the web search engines for financial gain. This includes such spamming called link bombing, spam blogs (splogs), referrer spamming.

Splogs- Splogs are blogs where the articles have been scraped from other sites. The purpose of a splog (spam blog) is to increase page rank or backlink of the spammer's own affiliate websites. If they are successful, they can inflate their paid ad impressions from visitors, or use the blog as a link outlet to sell links or get new sites indexed quickly. These blogs serve no purpose to anyone that hits the site.

Spam in Blogs - Is just what it says it is. The use of comments within blogs which offers no value to the posts. The commenter’s only purpose is to promote commercial services or to artificially increasing their own sites search engine ranking. If the spammer site sees an increased ranking, it can move ahead of quality sites, thus, increasing the number of their visitors and paying customers.

Blogmasters have used different techniques in eliminating blog spam. Some have turned off the comments section, allowing no comments at all. While others monitor the comments manually through software plug-ins that you have to download and install, or, the software can be part of the server package (Which is the case with Blogger).

Link Bombing- Link bombing involves using a specific keyword phrase within an anchored text link on other sites, with the purpose of gaining a higher page rank. However, Google has realized the problem and has adjusted their algorithm to combat this problem.

Referral Spam

Can you recognize referral spam if it hit your website or blog? If not, it is time to take a moment and know what you are up against, and how it can affect your website and possibly your profits. Referral spam is not seen on the face of a website or blog, but behind the scenes. In other words, it can be seen on your stats page.

Referral spam can be a major nuisance and you will recognize it instantly in your referral stats.
How obvious? The number of referral links, going back to your site can be huge. In my case, I noticed one obvious link that was five figures deep in referrals. I clicked on the link, and it popped me to another site, than another site, than another site.

What Does Referrer Spam Look Like

If you look at your stats on a daily basis, you will get a feel of what to expect. Thus, when referrer spam hits your referral log files the exorbitantly high hits will be the telltale sign. Here is an example of what you might see in your backend stats:

Top 40 of 203 Total Referrers
# Hits Referrer
1 5038 60.0% http://fakeurl/search
2 154 1.42% http://www.google.com/search
3 79 0.73% http://www.google.co.uk/search

As you can see the "fakeurl" stat is very high. If you are new, you may assume that "suddenly" your website or a certain web page is very popular. However...If I were you, I would investigate further. That's what I did. What I found was many different advertising sites flipping, one after the other. I killed the url, and realized I just witnessed referrer spam. I have to say I'm really lucky, I just got rotating advertising sites, because pornography sites use this tactic as well.

What is the Referrer's Purpose?

1. Referrer spammers are looking to get free backlinks and Google page ranking.
2. Some spammers want to bloat your stats to make it impossible to get an accurate record of your readership
3. Referrer spam can use up bandwidth. If you have a hosting plan that limits your bandwidth it can be very costly.
4. They are looking to redirect sales and customers away from your site, and to their affiliate sites.

How can you control referrer spam? Some webmasters and bloggers have responded by using filters and blocking through their htaccess file or robots.txt file. The robots.txt file will work with bots that are friendly and abide by the rules of the robots.txt file. However, if they are deliberately spamming, you can assume that the bot is not going to abide by the rules, and that is where the htaccess file will need to be used.

Stopping Referrer Spam

Is there a way to stop the referrer spammer? Yes. The following command in your .htaccess file will eliminate the problem completely.

order allow,deny
deny from 000.000.00.000 (being the IP address)
allow from all

Referrer spam can cause havoc for your blog or website. Thus, it is important to know what is going on with your website not only on the frontend, but on the backend as well.

Social Networking Spam

As the name implies, social network spam is directed at users of such social network services as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. Since users can send notes, which include embedded links to other social network locations or even outside locations, or to one another, this is where the social spammer comes in.

The social spammer will utilized the social network's search tools, and send notes to them from an account disguised as that of a real person. Stopping social spam is difficult because spammers frequently change their addresses from one account to another.

In May 2010, Facebook was faced with a viral marketing/spam/hacking scheme with its sole purpose of selling a product or obtaining the victims cell phone number for further criminal activities. Thus, it is important you know the individual who is sending the link before jumping on the click bandwagon.

To conclude, though spamming may seem to only be a nuisance, in reality, it's much more. It's a method by the spammer to gain page rank, or profits off your content. Thus, knowing what to look for in your stats, and how to fix the problem is important to your website or blog.