To block or not to block

I’ve been noticing quite a number of hits from sites such as jaja-jak-globusy.com and joogali.com. Visiting these sites, you can see they’re undoubtedly content scraper / spam referrer sites rehashing content available on the web elsewhere in other blogs or websites.

Now a webmaster or blog author would definitely have qualms about his/her work being used for what are likely to be commercial purposes without permission. And the question in this case would be whether to block such spam referrers or not.

After all, they do drive some traffic into your site.

But then again, their aggregating related content into single pages earns them (and not you) points for search engine optimization–at least in the short run, since the major engines are bound to ban them–and the targeted ad revenue.

So after weighing my options, I decided to ban spam referrers from ever hitting my site, at least on my WordPress-based J Spotter, the WP referrer bouncer plugin being readily available.

As for the J Spot, let them come!