We all get spammy new followers, but what exactly is the point? In this post, I thought we could chat about that.
First, what do I mean by spammy followers? I’m talking about people who are following your blog for reasons other than having any intention of reading it. I would consider a good 90% of my new followers to be spammy, and I will never see them again after that new follow shows up in my notifications.
So if the intention isn’t to read a blog, what’s the point of following it? I see two main reasons why people might do that. One is that they’re hoping that you play the follow-for-follow game (or are simply nice) and will follow them back. Another is that some bloggers have a widget displaying their followers, and the spammy person is hoping to show up there. Aside from that, though, I’m not really seeing other potential benefits that could be motivating them.
Oh, and if you get a new follower and clicking on their Gravatar in your notifications takes you to a page that says the site no longer exists, that’s probably not a spammy follower. More likely, it’s because the blogger changed their site’s URL at some point, but their Gravatar is still pointing to the old URL. WordPress doesn’t let people know when this is happening, so the blogger is probably blissfully unaware that it’s an issue. This blogging toolbox post goes into how to check and fix that.
You can remove someone as a follower if you want. Go to “My Sites” > “Stats”, and click on “Followers” near the top right corner of the page. That’ll take you to a list of your followers, and there’s a “Remove” button next to each one. I’ve found that some people are fairly persistent, either because they’ve built themselves a bot or because they’re blindly going through the Reader following any blog they find that they’re not currently following. Rather than getting into an unfollow/refollow war with these people, it can avoid much frustration to just let them be and ignore them.
If the follower’s gravatar is an obscene image (like a dick pic), you can report that to WordPress and they would probably remove it as a violation of the terms of service. Back in my earlier days of blogging, there was a dick pick gravatar that would repeatedly refollow me even though I kept deleting him. Once I reported him to WP, that stopped.
I used to get mildly annoyed by the masses of spammy followers, but now I just don’t care. Part of that is because I’ve stopped caring at all about my follower number because it’s so meaningless, so I’m not sufficiently motivated to make the effort to remove the spammy types. I know for some people, though, getting that follower number to be more reflective of reality can be very satisfying.
Do you get a lot of spammy followers? Does their presence annoy you?
The blogging toolbox series has tips to support you in your blogging journey. It includes these posts:
95% or more of our “followers” are spammy/bots/not engaged. We don’t like it. Many have blogs that are money making schemes. It’s hard to imagine anyone not involved in mental health blogging would ever see our blog except maybe our posts about Black Lives Matter. We never follow them back or visit them once we’ve ascertained they are from another planet compared to us.
From what I can tell, that other, non-genuine planet has been steadily growing in size, and people choose to move there because it gets them more “likes”, eve though it’s built on a foundation of nothing. It’s certainly not the way I would choose to appraoch blogging.
I’m mostly on Instagram for “life update” content, andI do my best to read blogs here for the same reason.
Both have been and still are because I’ve have little energy but no answers as to “why” yet.
I very much want to interact with friends and to have conversations, but then it’s also ridiculously frustrating how much harder it is for me write a thoughtful response in general.
I feel like my WordPress blog titles will be “life update…” hahaha.
I suspect most of my followers are spammy. Don’t have time to weed them out. Glad if the few like you who take the time to read and comment. Thanks 😊
Good information in this post. I get all kinds of spammy followers. I usually pay no attention to them. Lately I’ve been more bugged by WP congratulating me for being on a three-day streak or having 1000+ followers, as if I care.
Yes, lots of spammy followers but I don’t mind. I don’t follow back unless I’m really interested.
Great topic here Ashley and Thank you for addressing it and pointing it out. I personally don’t care about these spammy followers who are like stalkers , as long as my blog gets lots of traffic and stats that is what I care about, it is up to that follower if they want to read my blog or not👏
Been here a while
I guess I just follow silently..
But I like the ongoing conversations
I was baffled by this, too. I had a lot early on in blogging and I was gutted when my blog provider got rid of them, essentially culling the majority of my followers. I had no idea they were spammy! I very much only want to focus on genuine readership, support and interaction; I don’t have big numbers on my blog or social media and while that can get to me sometimes (“I’m so shit at this” blah blah) I still prefer it to pointless, meaningless numbers for the sake of them.
So yeah. I can understand the spammy followers doing it for follow/unfollow purposes, but I can’t see a reason otherwise. They’re so bored with nothing better to do, that they sign up to all the blogs they can? Maybe they ran out of flies to pull the wings off of? Who knows. x
I really don’t have a clue about followers and spam and so forth. I have been blogging for two and one half years and I have about 600 followers. Don’t know exactly what that means for me? You once said once you get above 1,000 followers, bot followers start to crop up. Do I need to do anything about this? Thanks as always for your expertise.
Do my comments display here Ashley or do some go to the spam folder?
I see you
Love you, ashley ❤️💕😍
Ashley for some reason I’m having trouble finding you on WordPress. I’m not that techie so I might be doing something wrong. I had your blogs name memorized so I typed it into my address bar and found you. I’m just hoping that you didn’t block me from your blog for some reason. I had been spending less time in blogland overall. Maybe it looked like I didn’t care anymore. Not the case. 😊 💕
Ashley has not been posting. This was the last post we’ve seen 😞
I’ve just followed you. Promise I’m not spammy 🙂
I’m not sure how many of my followers might be spammy, but i don’t automatically follow back. I’ll only follow if I’m interested in the topics/themes or like the content
You are very quiet Ashley – are you Ok ?
I stopped by with the same question..hope you’re doing well Ashley!
I don’t pay attention to spammy followers too much, just been interacting with the same handful of commenters and figured the rest might drop off. Hope you’re well Ashley and having a nice rest!