Bloggers, beware of these sites: Vampirestat, AdSenseWatchDog, Villainstat, UglyStat, Zombiestat

If you’re one to frequent the Stats feature of the Blogger dashboard, you may have noticed a couple of sites that generated traffic towards your blog. If any of them happen to be Vampirestat, AdSenseWatchDog, and ...


Villainstat, don’t bother checking out those sites. They’re expected to be rife with malware.
A list of bogus sites that you have to avoid can be found below:

• Vampirestat.com
• AdSenseWatchDog.com
• Villainstat.com
• Uglystat.com
• Zombiestat.com
• R-e-f-e-r-e-r.com
• OnTimeMarketing.biz

At first I thought one of my posts got popular or had been found useful by a reader that he shared it thru his site (Vampirestat) as a sign of thanks. Being a cautious person, I didn’t immediately visit the site and instead turned to Google for answers. As it turns out, it’s not just my blog that got bogus traffic. Other bloggers have been targeted, too.
So what must you do when you also get referred traffic from those sites? The answer is simple: do nothing. That’s right. Apparently, Vampirestat and company spam the statistics page of Blogger to lure curious users into their sites. A lot of things can then happen once users visit them: spammy ads, malware infection, phishing, and more.

Do you need to worry about your AdSense account getting banned for getting traffic from VampireStat and the like? Don’t. Just don’t get involved in these so-called referrer spam. These visits are automated and no actual links to your blog have actually been placed in the wrong places. You need not worry about your blog’s page rank or reputation.

Most important of all, don’t link back to them on your own blogs. You’re simply advocating their scam. It will also affect your search rankings negatively.

Other blogging platforms (e.g. Wordpress, Tumblr) are apparently unaffected by these bogus referring URLs. I don’t have any blogs beyond Blogger with meaningful stats, so I can’t verify by myself whether or not Vampirestat and the other spam sites appear there.

Realizing that a major number of visits to your blog is actually caused by referrer spam is indeed disheartening. Just don’t give up on your blogging. With nonstop passion to write, you can eventually increase your page views made by real visitors who frequent your blog for interesting content.

http://www.conanhughes.com/2013/11/bloggers-beware-of-these-sites.html