Referrer spam?
Question for fellow Typepad users (or fellow bloggers more generally): Lately half my referrer stats have been coming from the same Google Image search. Even after I deactivated the link that the search led to, the hits just kept coming. Is this a new form of spam, or what? It’s not as obnoxious as comment spam or trackback spam, but it’s still kind of annoying. And weirdly inexplicable. Anyone know why it’s happening? Thank you kindly.
I don’t have an answer for you, and I’m at diaryland, not typepad, but I’m having the same problem. Although in my case, there are a couple of different formulations of the search that are all arriving at the same image/entry from lots of different servers and locations. What I can’t figure out is that when I go into google and repeat the search, I can’t find it. It turns up pages and pages of images, so I haven’t gone all the way to the end, but I can’t believe anyone else would either, and certainly not the numbers I’ve been getting. It’s a mystery.
This is nothing new and not spam. Basically, it just shows that Google and other search engines make their money from other peoples content. You seem to have an image somewhere which either shows up on Google (you find the search only by cut/paste of the exact referrer string). Or (even worse) somebody has hotlinked your image.
Here is what I do in such a case:
Replace the original image with a picture which advertises your blog.
Now you begin to use Google instead of the other way around 😎