Coincidence or not?

I've talked about Spam Referral Sites before but I noticed an unexpected correlation over the last month between spam referrals and another site's blog roll.

Here are my all time statistics for referring sites. Nearly half of them are fake hits from just one spam referral site (vampirestat), there are another 700 hits from another spam site (adsensewatchdog) and there were several other spam sites that don't make the all time list but used to show up on daily, weekly and monthly lists.

All Time

Then about a month ago I noticed the spam sites weren't showing up on my daily or weekly stats anymore. I also noticed a big source of real referrals (Greedy Goblin) wasn't showing up anymore either. Checking into things a little further I found Gevlon had pruned his blog list, removing a number of blogs from his list, inlcuding mine.

I had to wonder if there was a correlation between being on Gevlon's bloglist and getting spam referrals from vampire stat and the rest. But I didn't want to jump to conclusions so I decided to watch it for a month and see what happened.

A month later, here are my stats for the Last Month

Last Month

All the old spam referral sites seem to be gone for good. =)

Semalt is suspicious, it might be a new spam referral site but if so it's low volume spam compared to the old ones.

This can't be just a coincidence. I very much doubt Gevlon is behind the spam referrals (he probably doesn't have a clue this is happening) so I figure the spammers must be using his blog list to find other blogs to spam. They probably do the same thing with many other blogs too.

I may have lost one of my 3 main sources of actual real referrals but if losing those referrals means the hundreds and thousands of bogus spam referrals have stopped for good that's just fine with me.

Referral numbers are actually meaningful again, Hurray!