Strange referral traffic

Just a quick fyi, not to be too alarmed if you are seeing large amounts of visitors coming from (often) Russian sites. Do not click on dubious referring sites, it's usually obvious they are not genuinely referals. From what I have read they are not a threat to your site, it is simply a way of boosting their own referrals and page visits.  It's done using robots rather than a little person sitting in an office actually visiting your site.

It is a spammers trick to get hits on their own sites via your blogger stats. I have been inundated with these of late!

If you check your Google Analytics account, instead of your blogger dashboard stats, you will probably find these dubious sites have been pre-filtered out from the data. At least this is the case with my stats. On the blogger stats on my dash board I had 743 visits from Russia last month, whereas on the analytics stats I had just 44...  so they must be identifying these spammers, even if they are not actually stopping them.  I'll update this if I find out any more about what blogger is doing about this.

I'm really keen to hear if any of you have had issues too?

Here's some further reading on the subject of strange referral sites -

Referer Spam Is Needlessly Alarming Blog Owners

Referrer Spam

Killing Referral Spam

 x Hilary :) .