Identifying spammers

[charlesmarshall66]

Hello there

Can anyone please advise me how I can tell if a visitor is in fact a spammer crawling through the site?

Many thanks

Charles

[webado]

You can't. You may assume that one that views many pages quickly is trawling the site, perhaps copying it or maybe trying toharvest email addresses if you have any there, but you cannot know if there's any intent to spam or copy or what.

Spamming means they send unsollicted emails, which are considered spam.

There is also another situation loosely called referrer spam. If you see as a referrer some site which has nothing to do with yours and does not actually have a link to your at all when you go and visit it, then you can say that is referrer spam - an extension of the original meaning of spam. They left a referrer in your stats with the intention to get to to go an look at the odd site you don't expect to have a link from.

[charlesmarshall66]

Many thanks Christina. Helpful.

[Darth AkSarBen]

They left a referrer in your stats with the intention to get to to go an look at the odd site you don't expect to have a link from.

Ahh... they are kind of throwing out "bait" hoping to fish in someone. Once you click back to their site, you might have cookies on your temp files now that might mean something. Is this a correct assessment? ie someone not even interested in your site, might go there to arouse curiosity?

[webado]

You can only get cookies when you visit a site, not by somebody else visiting your site.

But they will be able to know that you came to their site from inside your Statcounter log, as they will probably do their own logging by some means. Depending what use they make of that they will know their "campaign" worked to bring in traffic.