Motherboard Is Not Spam

Hey, new Motherboard visitor! You might have recently Googled for “motherboard.vice.com” because the URL of one of our articles popped up in your website’s analytics. According to Google Trends, a lot of you did just that.

Sorry about the spam, but hopefully you’ve ended up here too.

Those referrals in your analytics aren’t actually from us; they’re from someone likely using Google’s “Measurement Protocol” to put the URL of the article into Google Analytics traffic. Someone did this with an interview we carried out with pretty prolific Russian spammer Vitaly Popov. He likes his name to get out there.

Read More: This Russian Is Spamming Google Analytics to Show His Support for Trump

It appears the spike in attention has even generated some articles—or what appears to just be automatically generated content—on how to remove the “motherboard.vice.com” virus (in truth, we haven’t made our own computer virus—nor any other malware, for that matter). You probably don’t need to follow that advice.

Read More: Spammer Now Spamming Google Analytics With Motherboard Article on Spam

Anyway, we’re glad that you’re here now, even if you only stumbled across this because of this rather bizarre spam campaign, and just wanted to clear up that we’re not out to hack your computer, or spam your analytics, or anything else like that. Promise! Happy reading.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.