people have strange referrers to their site- whats that about?

U

UhoohExtra

I Love YTtalk
Re title above.. i meant to their 'youtube videos'. not sites
I notice when you analyse a popular video (albeit not credible popular uploaders) and see the inbound links /referrers, they are all made up of what appear to be 'Junk sites', usually featuring video uploads but on sites which have no other information on them. No 'about site' page etc. Is this where people have paid for dodgy views and had their vids submitted to random sites? Just wandered. Seems like a bad plan to me as it won't give you view time. Is there a point /benefit to what they are doing?
 
UhoohExtra said:
Re title above.. i meant to their 'youtube videos'. not sites
I notice when you analyse a popular video (albeit not credible popular uploaders) and see the inbound links /referrers, they are all made up of what appear to be 'Junk sites', usually featuring video uploads but on sites which have no other information on them. No 'about site' page etc. Is this where people have paid for dodgy views and had their vids submitted to random sites? Just wandered. Seems like a bad plan to me as it won't give you view time.
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This is very old technique of spam. I had in on my website since 2008-2009. Basically, it's software that changes the referrer to some spammy site and visits random pages (I see they upgraded it for YouTube as well). When curious webmasters and as I see visitors (viewers) want to check the statistics, they see these sites and they visit them. Spammers rely on mass submissions and little to almost no conversions, but even 1% conversion rate for them is a win, considering all this is done by automated software with no effort for them (make analogy with e-mail).
 
Hirudov said:
This is very old technique of spam. I had in on my website since 2008-2009. Basically, it's software that changes the referrer to some spammy site and visits random pages (I see they upgraded it for YouTube as well). When curious webmasters and as I see visitors (viewers) want to check the statistics, they see these sites and they visit them. Spammers rely on mass submissions and little to almost no conversions, but even 1% conversion rate for them is a win, considering all this is done by automated software with no effort for them (make analogy with e-mail).
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Yup. The internet is a vast place where a lot of people have set up a lot of automated stuff to basically try to scam a buck out of somewhere.
 
It's not the YouTube creator that is spamming. It's third party website owners who leech YouTube content by embedding YouTuber's videos and grab the description and even comments sometimes. There are website templates that automate this and so hundreds of these sites exist. They are officially called YouTube curators. They do it to create a lot of automatic web "content" hoping that google will pick up the content and list them without doing any work.

It's not a big deal when websites embed a video and write their own article around it. Nothing wrong with that. It's annoying though when their bots also grab your description that you've written. They are stealing your YT SEO and piggy backing off your brand and trying to get your traffic. Annoying.
 
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