Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Three effective solutions for Google Analytics Referral spam

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I published this post darodar.com referrer spam and should you be worried? back in December and I am still seeing a constant influx of frustrated website owners and concerned netizens getting worried about similar spams. I happen to be one of the first to detect this spam and post about it. I didn’t pay much attention to it as referral spam or web analytics is not my primary concern when it comes to computing. Working in IT field for over a decade and specifically IT security, I have a different view on spam and how they can be stopped. I opened my Analytics account yesterday cause I saw 25% traffic increase from Facebook, Twitter and many random sources and 83% increase on the root (“/”) of the server. Well, 25% is nothing, it can happen due to a post going viral. But this wasn’t the case this time as 83% increase was specific to the root (“/”) of the server It seems, our ‘beloved’ ‘Vitaly Popov’ has started a new stream of referral spam. He’s got more crafty as I predicted in my original post. He’s now actually using Facebook, Twitter as referrals including some new domains. In this post I will show three effective solutions for Google Analytics Referral spam.

Some facts about Google Analytics Referral spam:Three effective solutions for Google Analytics Referral spam - blackMORE Ops - 5

  1. By this time you know that Ghost Google Analytics Referrals spam cannot be blocked by .htaccess or web configuration.
  2. Ghost Google Analytics Referrals spam bots doesn’t really visit your website, so no trace of IP address be found in server logs.
  3. Ghost Google Analytics Referrals spam only abuse Google Analytics.
  4. Google Analytics hasn’t done anything about it, yet (officially).
  5. Google implemented encryption for all of their AdSense traffic.
  6. Ghost Google Analytics Referrals spam only affects Google Analytics.
  7. *** Ghost Referrals spam also affecting Yandex and few other search engines.
  8. As these bots doesn’t visit your website, they have no idea what your page title is. So Analytics will show (“/”) as the page title.
  9. These Ghost Google Analytics referral spam bots only targets your primary Tracking ID i.e. ‘UA-XXXX-1′

List of known Google Analytics Referral spam domains

Click to open list containing known Google Analytics Referral spam domains:

List of 194 new Google Analytics Referral spam domains

I now have a list of another 194 spammer domains that started yesterday.

Click to open list of new 194 new Google Analytics Referral spam domains

I mean seriously? users.skynet.be? It’s good to see they have some sense of humour.
So it seems very soon filters wont be enough. Actually it’s already not enough. Despite what the Analytics experts says, you can’t go around every day to filter hundreds of domains. Yes, you could filter for .be (i.e. Belgium) domains, but that’s a whole country we are talking about. So what is the best fix?



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