: Strange incoming links appearing on site statistics Last year, I started a small blog on wordpress.com. Most of my blog posts are about computational statistics. When I look at the site stats,

@Sarah324

These are spam blogs. They are created automatically by bots aggregating content to boost their domain's ratings. Such domains are then sold for more money. What they basically do is:


Leave spam comments on blogs that seem to be related thematically to keywords they try to capture. These comments are usually very general but sound natural, like "Hey! Great post, I did not know about this!". Since most blogs display URLs of people who comment, this automatically creates many links to their sites.
Copy content from other blogs to seem legitimate. They usually link back to the original post, taking advantage of the trackbach mechanism. Many blogging tools, like Wordpress, will display trackback links in comment sections by default so this generates just another flood of links and at the same time everything seems like a legitimate link exchange.

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@Kristi941

It's probably referrer spam.


Referrer spam (also known as log spam
or referrer bombing) is a kind of
spamdexing (spamming aimed at search
engines). The technique involves
making repeated web site requests
using a fake referrer url that points
to the site the spammer wishes to
advertise. Sites that publicize
their access logs, including referrer
statistics, will then end up linking
to the spammer's site, which will in
turn be indexed by the search engines
as they crawl the access logs.

This benefits the spammer because of
the free link, and also gives the
spammer's site improved search engine
ranking due to link-counting
algorithms that search engines use.

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@Michele947

There are any number of bots and crawlers that are going to hit your site. Sometimes these are going to be recognizable like the google bot, however, there are lots of spammers that are trolling around to comment on posts to build traffic for whatever reason. They could also be testing for vulnerabilities to exploit on your blog.

I'm sure that most of them are benign.

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