Rotten Tomatoes for Vampirestat

 

Has anyone else had their Blogger statistics skewed in a major sort of way? Gosh, I was thinking I was really popular since my blog was logging close to 200 pageviews on some days. Well, maybe not so much.

There are many bloggers who could probably care less. But you know me—the math and measurement geek. Any questions about why I revel in the exactness of piecing quilts? My boss at work loves the fact that I will crunch data for hours on end and even smile while I am doing it.

Apparently, there are spammers sites which show fake traffic to other people’s sites only to attract traffic to their sites. The best way to stop the nuisance from these sites is not to click on these sites, but it is not a cure. There is no way to effectively block the traffic on Blogger.

Not even rotten tomatoes.

Spam referrals like Vampirestat, Villainstat, Uglystat and Zombiestat sometimes lead web surfers to web pages containing malicious pieces of software that can affect your PC. Difficult not to click, though, huh?

The good news is that most commercial statistic counters that can purchased for Blogger don't include traffic from these sites. Their technology seems to be savvy about ignoring those fake pageviews. But Blogger does include all those spam-bot hits on our blogs. I—and probably thousands of other bloggers—have complained to no avail.

Admittedly, it is difficult to block such websites--even for Google. There are thousands of them out there.

I guess I will just have to stick to rotten tomatoes.

Addendum: Interestingly enough, the spammer sites left my blog alone when this article was first posted. I thought they had decided to leave a poor boring blogger alone. Several days later I posted “Spinach Before Ice Cream”. Within minutes, Vampirestat and 7secretsearch hit my blog almost 100 times. I guess they really liked my cat’s pictures. She really is quite a looker. Haha!