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Newbie/Basic Questions

New and confused

Author: L.Hayes (11 Aug 10 11:58am)

Hello. I just signed up for quick links because I have been getting a lot of spam referrers, or phantom referrers, to my blog at wordpress.com (not wordpress.org). Some questions: 1) Will the quick link be effective in trapping spam referrers, 2) Where exactly should I paste the links on my blog (really plain English here- I am not a fluent tech person), and 3) How do I know that I have placed them correctly and that they are functioning? When I go to my dashboard on this site, it says that I have not protected any websites, but I pasted the links around my blog last night. Any help you can give me would be great. Thanks!

Re: New and confused

Author: H.User1325 (11 Aug 10 1:26pm)

Welcome aboard! It can be a lot to take in all at once. I will start with your question 3)

The "websites you have protected" is the number of honey pots you have installed on your domains. The number on the left matches the box on the right "Sites on Which You've Installed Honey Pot:"
I believe the lines you can watch are "Traffic from your QuickLinks:" and in your case "Comment spam posts to your site(s)"

Not being a blogger I haven't payed much attention to comment spammers and don't know what info you have or are able to get. With a quick look I didn't see how you report those here, I'm sure someone will help on that.

2) add your quicklinks to several of your blog pages. As I'm sure you understand from your reading, the intent is for the links NOT to be seen or used by real people visiting you blog, but to be found by spiders stepping through html code for your pages. (It is hoped) that the spider "sees" the link, not knowing it is hidden, and follow it and then harvests an email address from there (if their intent is ill). A real person 1) will not see the you quicklink and if they do will 2) see the page full of "don't collect email addresses from here" word and NOT see any email addresses. On the other hand bad spiders will "harvest" those email addresses and if email gets sent we have a real who done it.

Anyway if you did not brake the code when you inserted the quicklinks they should be OK. IIUC you can stick the quicklinks into some of your page templates and then every time you create that type of page the quicklink gets added too.

1) this gets back to the comment spammers and - I don't know.

Re: New and confused

Author: L.Hayes (11 Aug 10 7:30pm)

Thanks! That helps to clear up some of my confusion. I checked, and like you said, there were 8 visits next to traffic from your website. (I assume those are spammers?) From that I take it that I successfully inserted the links. I did make sure to copy/paste the links exactly as given, so they are definitely hidden from view.

I appreciate the clarity with which you answered my questions. Now, does anyone out there know if this will help with the spam referrers coming to my site?