Why is my articles being linked to by spammers?

Server Config
1

Hi,

I have done numerous security checks on my site but can’t find anything.

The problem I’m having is that spammers keep linking to my articles with the anchor text ‘fake louis vuitton’ and other spammy words like ‘ugg’

These are my 3 articles that are being linked the most:

< removed at request of author >

If someone can please get back to me if they can find any security issues.

If they cannot, then if someone can please let me know why these sites keep linking to my articles with spammy anchor texts.

Thanks

2

Chances are it’s an automated process looking to get placement in your referrer stats in common web stats that many host have in place by default e.g awstats/webalizer (these are often publically accessible), and is probably not targeting your site specifically (rather, doing it across 1000s of sites / ip ranges of hosting companies)

3

Why would they do that?

4

Because they get links back to the referred site (though in newer versions of these apps they’ve sorted the exploits)

It’s a primary reason I don’t use server side analytics - in most cases they falsely record all kinds of spurious bot noise as legitimate traffic, and very few of these applications are sufficiently actively maintained to win the battle against traffic with malicious intent.

5

Besides google analytics, the only other analytics I’m using is jetpack.

Do you recommend I remove this plugin?

6

Who can see the referrer statistics? If it’s only you via the ACP I wouldn’t worry about it.
If you’re publishing them on public pages, i.e. showing as trackback comments, removing the stats plugin isn’t going to help, moderate them for approval/removal