Increasing referral spam on my blog is annoying me

Introduction

The last couple of months I noticed an increasing number of strange referrals on my blog from websites like keywords-monitoring-succes and buttons-for-website. Finally it got me so curious that I visited these sites just to see what it was. These links lead me to a website from a company named Semalt that apparently provides SEO services. With a little research I discovered that this company is engaging in a activity named referral spam. Referral spam is a black hat activity to attract traffic to a certain website or to improve their ranking in Google search. Referral spam is a problem when you're analyzing the traffic on the blog because the numbers are obscured by (in my case) a high percentage of spam.

All the indicated url's are from fix-website-errors.com. Clicking on the link took me to the website of Semalt, a firm that apparently provides SEO services.

Installing Google Analytics

Blogger doesn't offer any option to fight referral spam but it is possible to install Google Analytics on Blogger (a tip that I got from David Kutchner). Google Analytics offers way more options than Stats, that is provided by Blogger. More importantly Google Analytics also offers bot filtering. The option to install Google Analytics is somewhat hidden within Blogger. After creating a Google Analytics account, an Analytics Web Property ID is provided that can be entered in the Settings/Other area of Blogger. Within Google Analytics bot filtering can be enabled under Admin/View Settings.

Analyzing the results

After using Google Analytics a week with bot filtering enabled I noticed that referral spam hasn't been blocked. In fact I now have spam that targets Google Analytics and doesn't even visit the blog.  In the image below a referral law-enforcement-bot shows up that accounts for 35% of the traffic but isn't visible in Blogger's Stats. This leads me to conclude that Google Analytics with bot filtering on isn't effective against spam. In fact it attracts spam. This makes me wonder if I'm even worse off. On the plus side Google Analytics did help me to understand the traffic to my blog better. Something that just wasn't possible with Stats from Blogger. In the weeks to come I'll decide whether I keep Google Analytics installed or just look for another solution against referral spam (e.g. Statcounter).

Traffic and its source visiting my site. Image taken from Google Analytics. Note the law-enforcement-bot that doesn't even visit my blog but targets Google Analytics.

Back to DIY everything.

Blogger vs WordPress

My sister asked me to create a website for her business. In all honesty, it's been some time since I last made a website so I did some research before I started. I quickly found out that WordPress is now the dominating platform or content management system (CMS) as it is called. It's also completely open source (GPL license) which is a big bonus for me. It therefore didn't took me long to decide to use WordPress for the website.

While working with WordPress I was impressed by it's the ease of use and the huge number of themes. Also the support on the internet is excellent. So I began asking myself if I should move my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

I use Blogger for over a year and, although is was a great way to start blogging, I have some doubts about the platform. The user interface is a bit of a mess, especially if you want to do more advanced stuff. Yes, you can import a theme, or even create your own but my guess is that most people don't know how to do it. These options are hidden somewhere deep in the Blogger interface.

More importantly the Blogger website is owned by Google. Even worse Google also owns the content of your website. If Google decides to stop the Blogger.com service or if Google thinks that your website is in violation with their content policy and take your blog down you're out of luck. WordPress.org doesn't suffer from this. You download the WordPress software onto your server and you (not Google) are in control of every aspect of your blog.

It appears to me that the Blogger.com doesn't get a lot of attention from Google. This last year I haven't seen a major overhaul or new themes from Blogger.com. In fact some features are being removed. The blog posts on Blogger Buzz (the blog of Blogger.com) are sparse,  which isn't a good sign.

For the time being I will use both Blogger.com and WordPress. Maybe some annoying features of WordPress will pop-up. Also it will be interesting to compare the page views on both bogs. In a couple of months I'll decide which blog platform I'll prefer but as it stands now it probably will be WordPress.

Video of experiments directly to YouTube

Today I decided to upload my movies of the Make: Electronics experiments directly to my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPwwPIXHMZYcVyJ2SuRJjuA/videos . The reason is that the video that I included on blogger.com are of very low quality. I also decided to make one video for an entire experiment. This gives (hopefully) a better overview off the several steps during a experiment.