How are we affected by Referrer Spam?

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   Digital MDposted 9 years ago

   I've been reading on Google Analytics earlier today and correlated the guide with the gathered so far. While at it, I noticed a specific website* that has been funneling quite a chunk of referrals to my hubs. Being a new hubber, I was initially quite pleased and interested and I thought that maybe a link got posted somewhere referring to a hub of mine. I investigated the website, and as I search it, for some reason several terms such as "spam referral"  came out. As I read, it seems that is was a new site designed to spam links to your domain, and what is alarming about it is that it has the effect that makes Google attribute the spam as backlinks to your site/hubpage. There are a lot of similar sites like these as well as I checked the Analytics traffic.
   
   I'm wondering if this is a known issue and commonly resolved. Is anyone familiar with these "spam referral" sites? How do you guys go about it? and/or how dangerous is it with the reputation of the hub page to Google?
   
   Please Advise.
   
   *I opted not to put the website name here, I'm not so sure if it is against the rules. LOL.

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      Writer Foxposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Please put the website name, just don't make it a clickable link:  thisisthesite.com

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      1. 85

         Digital MDposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Here is the website:
         BlackHatWorth.com
         
         And there are the sources which refer to them as referrer spam:
         etsy.com/teams/7718/questions/discuss/15816070/
         cradlecloud.com/ban-block-blackhatworth-com-spam-referrals/
         
         It seems that the sites have been up for just 3 days. Maybe this is something to watch out for, its impact-- I'm not sure. That's why I opted to check with you guys, since you have lots of articles hence more data to check on.

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            Writer Foxposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            It appears that this is a group in Russia which operates under many URLs and it has been suggested that they are displaying webpages in iframes and then directing them to advertising sites.  In fact, when you put the URL for blackhatworth.com in your browser, it redirects to a shopping site.  If you put the URL for the host in your browser, it redirects to a shopping site which puts malware on your computer.
            
            Maybe the staff will block their access to HP. If you start a discussion in this forum category, the staff will see it on Monday:
            http://hubpages.com/forum/category/3001
            
            Just tell them to refer to this forum thread and to this:
            http://www.cradlecloud.com/ban-block-bl … -referrals

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               Taylor Qualmanposted 9 years agoin reply to this

               wonder if that has anything to do with the blackhat community...since they do things like this....

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      NateB11posted 9 years agoin reply to this

      This is a great question, one I've been wrestling with for awhile; because one of my sites gets a lot of referrer traffic. Matt Cutts has said it's just people trying to get you to click on the link, so they can drive traffic to their sites and you can just ignore it.
      
      One of the refferals I get on one of my sites is actually a google ads link, and people on the Web speculate it's our own advertisers trying to drive traffic to our sites. Don't know. The traffic I get from that google ad referrer, though, is quite a bit and they stay on the page for a significant amount of time.
      
      Of course, blackhatworth sounds pretty shady.
      
      You can block the refferer in Analytics if you feel it's skewing stats too much.

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   relacheposted 9 years ago

   Why did all of you just give the spammer website half a dozen valid backlinks in the forum?  Wasn't it obvious from Writer Fox's post that you had been given wrong instructions, because a live link was created there?
   
   Stop writing their name with the dot com attached.

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