Advertising links in Clicks?

  • musicdoc1 · Member ·

    My WordPress.com Clicks stat today includes a couple of unknown links that I don’t find in posts, pages, comments, or links. I’m guessing that they’re advertising links, but I don’t recall seeing advertising links in the Clicks stat before. Is this to be expected?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi Doc,

    That’s a type of referrer spam.

    How it works is someone visits your site, and clicks on a link you added to the post. But then they use code they’re running in their browser to spoof the referrer headers, tricking our system into thinking they clicked on an entirely different link.

    Their hope is you will see the strange link in your stats, click on it to see where it goes, and then visit their site where they benefit through something as innocent as ad views that earn them money (or boosting their SEO via backlinks – not an issue on WordPress.com as your stats are not public and aren’t crawled by search engines), right up to potentially trying to install malware on your machine.

    Any analytics system on the web can be tricked in this way, even Google Analytics, and to block this would require blacklisting every single domain manually, which is simply not worth it as these spammers constantly change the domains they use.

    So the best course of action is simply to ignore these when you see them.

  • musicdoc1 · Member ·

    Excellent answer. Thanks, buddy. : -)

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