Domar.ru - its a referrar spam not actual traffic

Domar.ru is a domain name frequently shows up in the blogger stats pages as a referrer. A referrer is usually a website that the visitor comes from. But in this case there is no actual visitor, just a request for a visit. In short, a referral spam.

Referral spam is a method to get traffic to a domain by deception. I will try to explain with the help of an analogy.

A man goes to the coffee shop and orders a coffee but leaves the place before the order is served. Now his entry will be included in the orders list but wont make it to the bills. Referral spam is something like this. A website (like Domar.ru) will request your blog/ website but won't actually be there for receiving the page (the connection is terminated).

This request will be present in your server log files but it actually is no good to you as the page is not loaded. But the visit won't be logged in the stats of a third party traffic monitor ( like Google analytics, statcounter) as  their monitoring scripts will be executed only when the page is loaded. So there will always be a difference between the server logs and the traffic monitor logs.

I checked back the domar.ru URL and found the following things

1. The website is privately registered so details of ownership are hidden from public.

2. The website first get forwarded to a clickbank hop link ( which is a legitimate online marketing company and then to some video advertisement site about money making.

How does the referrer spamming work for the spammer?

They work in three ways

1. The web masters who check their server log files might click on the link to know how their sites are linked. And usually the spam URL that shows up in the server log files can be traced back to some advertising and the spammer gets free traffic from your clicks.

2. If you do any purchase from the referred site, the referrer ( spammer) gets the commission.

3. Search engines that crawl your site and might index the log file and by this the spammer get a free indexing at your cost (a link from you to a spam site is a bad thing in the eyes of search engine).

What should we do ?

1 What ever you do NEVER EVER click the link from your logs. The blogger referral links that might appear on their site actually has a number representing your blogger blog ( Though the blogs have names, they have numbers designated by BlogID. You can see that in the address bar when you access the blogger).

2 If you are admin of a self hosted website/blog, you can move the server log to a private location ( By default the file might be placed in a folder where search engine eyes have a reach). Alternatively you can edit your robots.txt file to exclude the server logs from getting crawled.

3 Use a third party traffic monitor like statcounter or google analytics - If you are a blogger user adding a google analytics script is easy. you just need to know the analytics site number.