3 ms·
This is tangential, but is there any way one can use Cloudflare and not be subject to Google Analytics spam?
by arihant 11y ago
This is tangential, but is there any way one can use Cloudflare and not be subject to Google Analytics spam?
- jgrahamc 11y agoWhat are you talking about?
- arihant 11y agoThis: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your... And this: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/07/malicious-google-analytics-referral-spam.html https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/07/malicious-google-analytics-r... I and others that I know get this kind of referral spam on every single domain we have with cloudflare. I know DNS records are public, but is there something cloudflare and other public DNS hosting services can do to prevent this?
- chinathrow 11y agoThose spambots hit hard these days. However, they never ever touch your origin or your CDN at all (check your logs, nothing). They fake the log entry directly into the Analytics systems. Google has to cleanup, but sadly, they haven't moved a bit since ages.
- arihant 11y agoYes, that is true. However, the fact that only my cloudflare domains experience this suggests either, 1. They are targeting domains specifically with cloudflare nameservers. 2. They are somehow obtaining a list of domains running on cloudflare. Both these tasks are not hard to accomplish. And it is extremely irritating.
- shazow 11y agoMost of these spammers just emit events to a large range of GA tracking ids completely blindly, think of it as the equivalent of... for (var i=0; i<100000; i++) { ga('create', 'UA-' + i + '-1'); ga('send', 'pageview'); // But with a fake referrer } They do that a bunch of times per day from a bunch of different IP addresses. Adding host filtering to your properties on GA eliminates about 80% of spam which use this technique. It's possible you're being targeted due to being in a specific market or something, but it's unlikely to be related to Cloudflare. (At least I can't think of any reason why it would be related.)
- zo1 11y agoDo you have any insight as to why those spambots would do that? The only thing I can think of is SEO for the "referral" domain, so that they boost their own domain's ranking.
- manigandham 11y agoThat's mostly why... to get unsuspecting people to visit those referral links wondering where the traffic is coming from.
- thejosh 11y agoI see this on so many sites, including those not on Cloudflare.