Most season bloggers almost certainly know this already, but if you are new to blogging or are considering taking it up, I want to make you aware of a trick that the spam-a-lots of the world are using to get you to visit their sites.
They will give you traffic.
See they know full well you are watching the traffic you get through analytics. You can see what pages people come to your blog from, and they know that if you see an unfamiliar name, you might click on the link to see what's going on. Maybe you've gotten a shout out on another blog or some social media hub (like Stumbleupon) has found one of your articles. You have arrived! Better click and find out who your new fan club consists of.
Many of these sites are basically spam. They've auto-clicked your site to generate traffic knowing full well that you will wonder where the hits are coming from and click back to them. Bingo. They've figured out a way to get your eyeballs that's more reliable than putting their URL in a comment (and the fact that most spam filters will block such comments).
Be particularly wary though. While most of these sites are just links to commercials about their service to get you more web traffic, some of them are pretty aggressive. Several open up new windows and one set off my antivirus. These aren't sites you're going to want to click just to see what's going on.
How can you tell? Well, sometimes they have funny URL's (like "www4.whatever... instead of the regular "www.whatever".) They also have similar behavior that can give you a clue. They usually find you faster than anywhere else. You can get traffic from them within just a minute or two of posting. And they also have all their multiple hits land at exactly the same time. So if you post at 10:07 and you see that you have three hits at 10:10 from the same site with a funny name, you probably don't want to check them out.
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Does this mean you'll take it easy on the compulsive checking now? ;)
ReplyDeleteMadness.
DeleteIt just means I'll be careful when I see I have six insta-hits from someone with name like tr.netlog_dot_com.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI have a blogger account. It gives you the option of typing a post from your email address, then sending it directly to be published on your blog. I'd never done it that way before--I'd always gone to blogspot and written it there, but this one time last week I wrote a post via email. Ever since then, there are all these posts on my blog that I didn't put there, and they're all spam! You know, all the typical stupid ones about people in Zambia wanting to give me money, and about how I won two million pounds in the UK lottery... My question is, what do I do now? How do I stop this spam from being published on my blog--I don't even know where it's coming from! Did someone hack my account? HELP!!! Thank you!
Steering Rack
Hi Conry. I wish I knew how to help you! I'm pretty new at this myself, and I'm sharing insights as quickly as I discover them. Perhaps something in the e-mail post "reset" your spam settings. Have you tried going back into the comments section and reestablishing the spam filters?
ReplyDelete