HN Explorer

Ask HN: Dodgy sites linking to mine. Any ideas why?

1 points by cubicle67 ↗ HN
Decided to look at the analytics for an old blog (only about 6 posts in all) and discovered almost all traffic is coming as referrals from sites I wouldn't expect. It looks like something dodgy is going on, but I'm unsure what.

Blog is on blogger and seems ok (no spam comments etc)

Example referring sites are www.acessa.me www.tinyurl.com/UnlimitedHostingService www.is.gd/UnlimitedWebHosting www.tinyurl.com/ForexTradingSystems www.tinyurl.com/MakeMoneyWithYourWebsite

Any ideas?

4 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
sc68cal
Probably trying to make themselves look more organic by linking to your blog, for SEO purposes.
cubicle67
thanks. that was about the best I could come up with too - some sort of sleezy SEO attempt. Just wanted to make sure the reason wasn't something like "Your blog's been hacked and is now part of [evil scheme]"
unattended
Not sure if I'm 100% accurate with this answer, but I've seen stuff like this in the past with some of my own sites and logs. My take on it is that if you visit any one of those sites, it's typically SEO linkbait garbage where the person who owns the domain in question simply feeds the user/search engine exactly what they're looking for to gain rank. Then either a crawler will follow it to map or a naive user will follow the link and you'll see it in your analytics logs later.

Pretty sure there's a little more to it, but that's my best assessment of what's going on until someone else has a better explanation.