Referer Spam Does Not Represent Real Traffic, To Our Blogs

We've been discussing referer spam for many months now. Every week, besides many people who wonder

Why doesn't Google put an end to this, for good?

there are occasionally some folks who wonder

But is this all bad? Doesn't this help us in our overall Blogger statistics as far as traffic counts go? If so, it's not all bad - for those of us with less than ginormous followings.

And both attitudes reflect people who just don't understand what it is.

We've already discussed, repeatedly, why Google can't just put a end to it, unilaterally. The latter musing, considering that it may possibly be beneficial to any Blogger blogs, is no more valid than the former. Referer spam simply cannot be blocked, because it is not different from legitimate traffic.

The numbers reflected in our Stats logs do not represent any actual traffic against our blogs, or any websites with links to our blogs. The only person who benefits from referer spam is the owner of the advertised (fake referer URL) sites - and that happens only when we click on the links in the Stats display.

Only Stats, which builds its pageview counts and graphs using the Blogger server activity logs, is subject to referer spam. All third party visitor logs and meters, which depend upon snippets or widgets added to the blog template, are not subject to this problem.

So, besides my facetious advice that you simply

Don't click on the links.

comes equally facetious advice that you

Get a third party visitor log / meter, for accurate and comprehensive pageview counts.

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