Looking through my website stats I noticed refreshthing.com showing a number of times. This is a service where you can open a web page repeatedly by setting the url and regularity of the refreash.
Here is the evidence and what to look for.
and this from mybloglog’s own stat service
It’s pretty easy to spot, of course a more clever person would use Opera to spam mybloglog.
So why so people do this?
They get their picture to show on your website which then hopefully ellicits clicks and then traffic to their own sites.
Why should I be bothered?
It stops a genuine Mybloglog person showing up.
It increases bandwith with no reward.
Is there an upside to this?
It may increase Alexa rankings and page views.
What can I do to stop this?
First you need to identify who is doing this. This would mean closely observing your widget (young man!, sorry people who don’t watch Harry Enfield) and seeing who keeps popping up. Now, this is a supreme waste of time and probably more harmful than the actual spam.
An easier way would be to monitor IP numbers in your stat service and then block using your .htaccess, again this may be tricky as a lot of people reset IP numbers and you don’t want to block genuine people.
The best thing is to report your suspicions to Mybloglog, they now have a “report spam” button and they can then observe.
You could also block refreshthing.com from your site using .htaccess
Do you think they have set a huge control room, set up in a power station somewhere in the Nevada desert, the walls covered with thousands of monitors showing our surfing habits in real time?
3 replies on “How to know if you are getting Mybloglog Spam”
Hum… Very interesting I must say, I am learning every day. But I cannot say that I understand very well why people bother cheating like that? I think I must be missing something somewhere…Having a million of visitors to your site is one thing, but if you have nothing to give them they won’t come back anyways, so, what is the point??? And if you do have something sensational to offer, you don’t need to do that, people will see it. Won’t they???
That’s a very good question Martine.
Most websites that use this technique use adsense, if blended into the editorial of the site it can be difficult to distinguish between the advertising and the editorial content.
I am not here to say whether that is right or wrong. Is product placement in movies wrong? Are chat show guests wrong to plug their book on chat shows?
It’s a debate for an online media Masters level thesis. The scope is too large for this humble blog.
So, getting %15 of your visitors to click an ad means if you you get 100 people to your site you have 15 clicks. At 20c a click that’s $3.
Not much, but what if it were a thousand, what if the process was automated. What if as sites get banned new ones are set up, it only cost dollars.
So there you have it, it is worthwhile getting any kind of traffic for this type of business model.
Problem is, it’s short term. It doesn’t build on itself as the sites crash and burn.
And so the cycle continues.
But on the scale of things I don’t think it’s that big a probelm. I worry about Darfur a lot more than I worry about mybloglog spam.
You are so right Lyndon it is not a problem at all. I find it quite amusing but I like to understand and I find that you are very good at answering questions and very knowledgeable.
Other than that, I find it such a waste of time and energy to try to trick a system, any system mind you. When you look at the big picture you know that in the end, it is not going to work.
Well, back to my day trying to “change the world” quite an ambitious task but if everybody tries in their little corner… Dreamers…