My analytics have been showing pricey.com referral from Samara every day for a couple of weeks, usually 7-8 times a day, I have also had buttons for website, semalt.semalt, and forum.topic25627636.darodar.com / referral
Am I under any threat from these, should I take any action or just ignore them?
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clairelou65
- Posts: 118
- Joined: Wed Jun 15, 2011 2:03 pm
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Clairelou65 - I don't know if you have a PMP website ( your site won't load for me but I am currently on airport wifi so that may be the reason)? If so, they are onto it - at least four of these or similar which I have reported. Perhaps they need to know each one as it turns up so they can filter them out. I reported only search, daroder and another couple I can't remember, some time ago. I think semalt was one. I think they are called redirect viruses and some of them can load up toolbars on your computer - so you can shop for Russian Viagra more easily presumably....
This is often called 'referrer spam' and, though annoying, is unlikely to represent any meaningful threat and you're certainly not the only person seeing this rubbish in your stats - they hit pretty well every site that they can get to. It's mainly just another way to get the unsuspecting to click through, although some of these sites could be hosting malware which could attempt to use browser exploits to install really nasty stuff on your computer if it's vulnerable (eg because the computer doesn't have up-to-date anti-virus and anti-malware software, and/or because the web browser is old).
So absolutely NEVER click through to them. Usually the name is a dead giveaway - but some may use domain names which look convincing to call your bluff.
Editing your HTACCESS file manually to counter all of these would take until the end of time. There are resources (free and paid) to be found online which provide lists of undesirable 'user agents'. Comprehensive lists have many thousands of lines, and if your site was on a low-spec shared server - and many are - processing the file at each page load would really slow things down.
Website services such as PMP and the like will be squeezing just as many sites as they can on each server, and it's really in their interests to have a robust approach to countering 'robot' users, as these would otherwise sap server power and waste bandwidth. It's likely that they'll be using hardware firewalls, and keeping them constantly updated. They'll also be monitoring traffic across multiple sites, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't tell them if you spot something: the more eyes the better.
So absolutely NEVER click through to them. Usually the name is a dead giveaway - but some may use domain names which look convincing to call your bluff.
Editing your HTACCESS file manually to counter all of these would take until the end of time. There are resources (free and paid) to be found online which provide lists of undesirable 'user agents'. Comprehensive lists have many thousands of lines, and if your site was on a low-spec shared server - and many are - processing the file at each page load would really slow things down.
Website services such as PMP and the like will be squeezing just as many sites as they can on each server, and it's really in their interests to have a robust approach to countering 'robot' users, as these would otherwise sap server power and waste bandwidth. It's likely that they'll be using hardware firewalls, and keeping them constantly updated. They'll also be monitoring traffic across multiple sites, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't tell them if you spot something: the more eyes the better.
Susie Jane - go to the menu on the left hand side of Analytics. Click on Acquisition, then All Traffic. You will then see all the different sources. You can change how many rows you see down the bottom. Another good one is Overview as you can see how much traffic is finding you by what mechanism eg organic search, direct traffic, referral, social media, email etc
There's a bunch of You Tube videos: https://goo.gl/mGhRZ7
Some guests just need a sympathetic pat. On the head. With a hammer.