Why do lots of my blog referrals come from a porn site?!

[Albadross]

I hope I'm being an idiot here - it's got to be because of advertising, right?

[Albadross]

Anyone? Or are my readers just really into porn as well as mental health? (not that I'd be that surprised)

[MmeLindor]

No idea. Do they have a twitter feed or something on there?

Sometimes spam sites link to sites so that you will go look at their site - like the spam comments you probably get a lot of.

[ScandinavianInUK]

These Ghost Referrer Spam and doesn't actually mean visitors are seeing your site from adult sites. They target random sites and get its name becuase it doesn't reach/use your site actually.

You shouldn't worry about security issues but if you want to keep your google analytics clean you can exclude them from your reports,

[jm90914]

Yea it's called referral spam. They're not real visitors.

These sites send fake traffic (think a computer visiting your website without a human operating it) in order to get their website address to show up in your Google Analytics stats.

Their hope is that, having seen their address in your stats, that you'll go and visit their site.

It's annoying, but nothing to worry about.