Strange referring sites appearing in Google Analytics reports

Thursday, 02 June 2011 11:53

This is what is known as Referral Spam.

Referral spam will show up as strange site address's in your Google Analyics reports under Traffic Sources.

Typically you can recognise them by referring sites listed that have all or one of the following:

• A url with a phrase to do with making money online, or hosting or trading
• A url that may or may not include a "tiny url"
• the domain name is not one you recognise and would not be one that has or would ever have a link to your site from.  Dodgy SEO's will register your site on "1000's" of directories and sites not related to yours so it could be one of those -  but they don't provide any benefit anyway. 
• Recently we've seen one that is a domain name with a european country code (illustrated below)

What causes this referral spam ?

Referral spam or log spam is fake traffic generated by websites that are not related to your own.

These websites use programs that send fake visitors to their site - but Google thinks these fake visitors came to your site.

So why should you care?

The underhand purpose is to increase the referral site's search engine ranking so they appear on the first page of Google. 

If you've ever heard of Black Hat SEO - this is a Black Hat technique.  One that manipulates results and perverts the intention of Google which is to help users find quality sites. 

It is unethical and a form of cheating.  It is not clever or part of the game and, like email spam, it gets in the way of everyone else because it makes getting decent search results harder.

What can I do about it?

Don't worry too much about it because it isn't likely to be a direct attack on your site.  It is not a reflection on your site or it's security.

Do NOT, out of curiousity, go and visit the site to see who it is.  That just serves their purpose.

You can ignore it if it the numbers aren't particularly high.

There are technical ways to block it if you are really serious about it - you should talk to your web developer/technical support on how to do it because the solution depends on your setup.

You can setup filters in Google Analytics to filter them out if you are concerned about what it is doing to your stats.  But actual numbers mean little in website analytics anyway because of the number of random factors that can pervert the accuracy.

This is why we recommend focusing on trends and REAL results like leads and sales.

And please, don't be tempted to contribute to the problem by engaging anyone who includes these kind of tactics for short term gain.