Traffic from strange sources

Gina145 Level 1

August 23, 2017, 11:28 am

19

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From time to time my blog will show a sudden unexpected spike in traffic. When I look at Blogger's stats to see where the traffic came from I often see that the referring URLs are sites that I've never heard of. I've tried visiting some of those sites and they almost invariably turn out to be porn sites. As the sites have no connection at all to my niche, I can't understand why they would have links to my blog and I find it quite disturbing to think that my blog might be associated with sites that I would never even visit. I'm also not sure whether this is legitimate traffic or bot traffic.

Could this traffic be harmful to my blog, specifically in connection with the rules governing my use of affiliate advertising and AdSense?

Is there anything I can do to stop this happening, or am I worrying about nothing?

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cmoneyspinner

cmoneyspinner

I don't think you are worried about nothing. It's a legitimate concern. But I also think there is something in your Google account dashboard that restricts that kind of traffic to your site. I thought I saw something but I did not look further because I'm not having that problem. Another member here at SEOClerks can probably give you better advice. I just responded because I wanted you to know there surely must be something that can be done. Good question. Hope someone can answer you.

9 years ago

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Gina145

Gina145

Thanks for the suggestion. I've done a little reading online and apparently this kind of traffic can't be blocked on Blogger sites though there seem to be ways of blocking traffic from a particular country elsewhere. I found one site which sells a traffic blocking service at $399 per year - not worth it to me because my blog doesn't earn anywhere near that much.

The most useful advice I was able to find is not to click on the suspect sites I found listed in my blog stats because doing so will just encourage more visits from that site. The author of that article also stated that my blog URL doesn't actually appear on those sites so there's no need to worry. That's really encouraging.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

Sometimes there is a particular traffic that you don’t expect because traffic is just like in real life that you see in the roads. A limousine that is on a side street is kind of amusing and strange. With the traffic, we have to take note of the bots that they will always be there and probably those bots have been connecting your site to those undesirable sites. But I’d say that traffic is traffic no matter where it came from.

8 years ago

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DarthHazard

DarthHazard

Hmm, it seems weird. Do you use any of that social clicker sites that you can add your URL to and it pays people in virtual currency to spend about 5 seconds on your site? Or do you maybe use one of those redirection URL services? If you do then that could be the cause because it could be that the user is being made to look at that as an advertisement and then getting redirected to your website. If not, I can't really think of what could be the problem. It is extremely weird and not one that I have ever heard of, to be honest with you.

9 years ago

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peachpurple

peachpurple

This is an alarming issue. Did you use other share url sites besides the social medias? Once I used Ping and it brought so many odd readers to my site. The traffic flow did increased but my posts were plagiarized by the readers. So, be careful.

9 years ago

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Baburra

Baburra

I also noticed this with my blog especially during the initial stages, but I didn't really do anything else about it and now my blog is still doing alright, so I don't think there is anything to worry about. I could be wrong though, as peachpurple has stated someone might be plagiarizing your content. Come to think of it, I probably should check if someone hasn't already done that with my articles.

9 years ago

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overcast

overcast

Most of the bots usually have the header of some russian sites, adult traffic sites etc. Those are just there to misguide you. Often the russian bots are scraping your content to show it on their channels. So you can ignore it. Nothing specific about it. For example russia and china have american stuff banned. So the scraping sites copy the content from your or any other site and show their version of content. So you can ignore such sources.

9 years ago

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Gina145

Gina145

I haven't really noticed traffic from China, but I do get a lot from Russia at times so I guess that's it. My main blog is about growing bonsai trees though and I can't understand why that would be of interest to porn sites. And if they're copying my content, isn't that plagiarism?

9 years ago

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overcast

overcast

It is plagiarism. But DMCA doesn't apply in Russia. They have their own ways to deal with it among themselves. They don't care about copyrights of foreigners. So it'd be battle wasted if you choose to send DMCA. Because Russians host don't respond to those requests. And you can't kill their advertisers on this too. So just ignore those bots in that case.

9 years ago

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Gina145

Gina145

That's really disturbing. I wish there was a way to block traffic from Russia then, but it seems it's not possible.

9 years ago

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overcast

overcast

It is possible to block traffic. If you have WordPress then you can use plugins to allow and disallow the traffic from some specific countries. But that's one part of it. This type of stuff does not block the bots. You are going to see the content being scraped by bots. On that point you can see that traffic sources are harder to manage as well. So that's something we have to consider.

9 years ago

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Gina145

Gina145

WordPress certainly has its advantages - this being just one of them. Unfortunately I opted for Blogger so that I didn't have to pay for the privilege of monetizing my blogs, and from what I've read Blogger doesn't offer this option. I guess I'll just have to live with this unwanted traffic.

9 years ago

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augusta

augusta

I think it has to do with where you're promoting your blog.You might be posting it on a wrong platform but your followers might.someone might even be sharing your content on that site or those sites.

You could try trying disabling the social share button on your blog for a while to see what happens or look at the followers retweeting your link or text.

9 years ago

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itommy

itommy

Could this traffic be harmful to my blog, specifically in connection with the rules governing my use of affiliate advertising and AdSense?

Of course if the source of traffic came from invalid sources like sex sites or hacked sites then you should check and remove your links from those sources to make your site has a clean traffic and good for SEO.

Hope that helps!

9 years ago

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keen2write

keen2write

Yes, this as happened to me before when I use to use blogger. I would get some link I never heard of getting traffic from it. These days I just use WordPress and find it much more easier to get traffic too.

9 years ago

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kgord

kgord

I would want to block it if I were you. I would not want a number of porn sites showing up on my computer. It is just something that shouldn't be. I wonder if you could get a malware blocking tool that would keep that from happening. Not sure, but something should be able to be done.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

It is definitely puzzling why you are getting traffic from those sites. Let me relate our experience with one video that we changed the description to a phrase that contains sex scandal. With that, it started getting traffic until it got 100,000 views. As per our investigation, some viewers have been spreading the link that reached some porn sites. Until now that video is still getting traffic from such sites and it now has more than 200,000 views.

9 years ago

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jpyy

jpyy

Well, one thing you need to do is use Google and Bing's disavow tools, respectively. Those links from probably bad neighborhoods can massively hurt your SEO. Anyway, though, despite the fact you can disavow links for SEO, you probably cannot remove them at the source. However, that's no big deal - as at least your SEO won't go down.

8 years ago

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Jeane

Jeane

I noticed something like this when I had a blogspot blog. My stats would show that I'd got lots of traffic from Yandex. Mostly bots. So, this shouldn't really concern you that much.

One thing you could do however is use an SEO tool to see if there are any links to your site from any of the porn sites you mentioned. How you can get rid of these bad links once you find them however might be quite difficult. You could submit a spam report to google? Use Google's disavow links tool, tell Google to ignore said backlinks for ranking purposes?

8 years ago

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