Looking through my website stats I noticed refreshthing.com showing a number of times. This is a service where you can open a web page repeatedly by setting the url and regularity of the refreash.
Here is the evidence and what to look for.
and this from mybloglog’s own stat service
It’s pretty easy to spot, of course a more clever person would use Opera to spam mybloglog.
So why so people do this?
They get their picture to show on your website which then hopefully ellicits clicks and then traffic to their own sites.
Why should I be bothered?
It stops a genuine Mybloglog person showing up.
It increases bandwith with no reward.
Is there an upside to this?
It may increase Alexa rankings and page views.
What can I do to stop this?
First you need to identify who is doing this. This would mean closely observing your widget (young man!, sorry people who don’t watch Harry Enfield) and seeing who keeps popping up. Now, this is a supreme waste of time and probably more harmful than the actual spam.
An easier way would be to monitor IP numbers in your stat service and then block using your .htaccess, again this may be tricky as a lot of people reset IP numbers and you don’t want to block genuine people.
The best thing is to report your suspicions to Mybloglog, they now have a “report spam” button and they can then observe.
You could also block refreshthing.com from your site using .htaccess
Do you think they have set a huge control room, set up in a power station somewhere in the Nevada desert, the walls covered with thousands of monitors showing our surfing habits in real time?