24 November 2013

Automated traffic on your blog (scary!)

This quote comes from the useful Spamspoiler blog, and highlights something that all bloggers should be aware of --

"If you have a blog and check to see where the traffic to your blog originates, you may notice traffic from websites called Vampirestat.com, Adsensewatchdog.com, Villainstat.com, Uglystat.com and/or Zombiestat.com. First off, don't click on them to find out why they are sending you traffic.

Neither Adsensewatchdog, nor any of these others have anything whatsoever to do with Google or Google AdSense and are essentially spam sites that use automated traffic to blogs to attract clicks to their own sites from blog owners such as you. Once you're at their site, at a minimum, you'll be fed ads. At worst, you might fall victim to malevolent code that seeks to infect your computer with who knows what (although I haven't verified that these particular sites are seeking to plant anything on your machine).

Stay away. "
"Domain secrets revealed!" - hmmm....
A couple of other I see a lot on my stats are 7secrets.com and searchconduit.com. Both of these seem to be "domain information" sites. Look up the latter and you will find lots of info on how to remove the virus it inserts if you have clicked on the link on your blog stats.

(I heard about it here.)

1 comment:

The Idaho Beauty said...

I occasionally look at the stats page and frankly, can't make heads or tails of most of it. It never matches up to what I get from Sitemeter, for one thing, in terms of actual page visits. But I admit I wondered about those Vampirestat.com. Not enough to click on it but I do find it a bit fascinating about how traffic gets pointed to the blog. I'd know that a good portion of it comes from spam sites like these based on the anonymous comments I used to get. Have eliminated anonymous comments - rarely were they a real person.