8 ms·

How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google Analytics

185 points by NonMathGirl 10y ago

faitswulff 10y ago
"Error establishing a database connection" Looks like HN traffic took it down. Here's Google's cached verson (Archive.org didn't have it): https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cC67C6lKYBYJ:kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cC67C6...
- zhego 10y ago
  Their website is live again http://kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics/ http://kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics...
nodesocket 10y ago
I had also gotten absolutely swamped in Google Analytics with things like: Language: Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump! o-o-8-o-o.com search shell is much better than google! Vitaly rules google *:｡゜ﾟ･*ヽ(^ᴗ^)ﾉ*･゜ﾟ｡:* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯(ಠ益ಠ)(ಥ‿ಥ)(ʘ‿ʘ)ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ヽ(ﾟДﾟ)ﾉʕ•̫͡•ʔᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ(=^ ^=)oO Google officially recommends o-o-8-o-o.com search shell! However, I recently applied the following account level filter and seems to have helped a ton. I can't guarantee this will 100% work, but it has certainly helped. http://imgur.com/a/z9gSg http://imgur.com/a/z9gSg EDIT: Here is the regex so you can copy and paste it: \s[^\s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,
- chinathrow 10y ago
  I see the same spam. At this point I think the filtering by the average GA user base costs Google way more CPU cycles than an overall firewall ruleset.
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    Wait a day. The filter only affects traffic after it was applied.
faitswulff 10y ago
Note that the "k" is a Cyrillic "к" and the trick is to get analytics users to click referral spam: > Referral (or ghost) spam wasn’t that innocent. Curious marketers and web analysts checked domains they supposedly got traffic from. Referrers got them transferred to trashy websites with ads, viruses or porn. > ...[Vitaly] needed software to get his websites into people’s analytics reports. His words were “if only one out of 1000 people click the link to see who these referrers are, I’ll gain profit.” I just installed Google Analytics on my site and saw these weird referrers, and my site is quite obscure. Seems like this could be a widespread problem. There's also a fix in the article from Georgi Georgiev: http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-google-analytics-spam/ http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-... > Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Admin -> Filters area. Add a new filter with the following settings. Make sure you have the “Edit” access at the “Account” level in Google Analytics. Remember that the filter will eliminate traffic hits where the language dimension contains 15 or more symbols. > Filter Pattern is .{15,}|\s[^\s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/.
- soared 10y ago
  Any guesses on the value of the "google.com" with the Cyrillic G? I'd say $1MM.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    i thought that when icann allowed non-latin characters in URLs, they were going to limit it to only the ccTLD where those characters were in common usage - so ԍooԍle.ru would be valid, but ԍooԍle.com wouldn't be registerable. am i misremembering, or did that plan change? this just seems like a phishing nightmare.
    - 086421357909764 10y ago
      I actually just ran a query on a domain using Google Domains and was offered a .com variant of an existing domain with the only difference, the letter c with a Hacek (Ĉ). Phishing nightmare indeed.
  - 10y ago
ifrins 10y ago
I also receive all sorts of spam hits on Google Analytics accounts. My suggestion is to create a filter that only includes the traffic directed to your hostname. It filters pretty much everything. But it's another problem in mobile apps tracking. I've yet to find a solution on mobile. Any suggestions?
t3ra 10y ago
Isn't cloudflare blocking this spam? Because I was managing a WordPress site for a client behind cloudflare and they were still able to spam usi g this technique
- hbcondo714 10y ago
  No, the referal spam never hits the website. It instead goes straight to GA.
  - soared 10y ago
    hbcondo714 is correct, nothing every actually touches your website. Its send with the measurement protocol, which allows you to POST data straight to GA. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
  - klenwell 10y ago
    This is the detail that the article seemed to miss. Or did I miss it?
- partiallypro 10y ago
  Cloudflare does block some spammers, and marks them as "bad browser." But it doesn't catch all types of spam attacks. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-What-does-the-Browser-Integrity-Check-do- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-W...
shortformblog 10y ago
This has been written about a few places, including Motherboard (where, full disclosure, I contribute): https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-pro-trump-russian-is-spamming-google-analytics https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-pro-trump-russian-is-... Not long after doing the interview with Vitaly, they had to write a follow-up because the original article ended up being used as GA spam: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spammer-now-spamming-google-analytics-with-motherboard-article-on-spam http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spammer-now-spamming-google... That cycle has repeated itself a few times (The Next Web ran into something similar a month prior). To be honest, the real problem here, far as I can tell, is that Google hasn't figured out a way to make whitelisting traffic easy in Analytics. Most people don't use a tenth of GA's overall power, and as a result have no idea where to look when it comes to building out filters and such. Yes, those who seriously do analytics for a living know how to handle this, but the problem is, there are a lot of people who use GA because it "just works," and it doesn't do the job if someone's just throwing junk into the referrers. This problem is widespread and it depreciates the value of a fundamental Google product. Why is a company that's so good at filtering spam apparently ignoring the problem in this case?
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Exactly, I started using GA a few months back, have no clue how to filter this out.
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    Add a filter that only allows data from your domain. I found this on a spammy content marketing site somewhere. I added this and haven't seen any referral spam since. I'm not sure what the pros and cons are, maybe someone here can elucidate? In GA: Admin -> All Filters -> Add Filter -> Predefined Filter Type -> Include Only -> Traffic to the hostname -> tha contains -> Enter your hostname in the text box ie mysite.com.
    - shortformblog 10y ago
      The fact that there are eight steps to get to your suggested solution only underlines my point that Google needs to create a simple solution to this problem. It should be three steps, tops. That said, there are some weaknesses to this solution. Here's why: For larger businesses, they may have multiple websites, and those websites may need to work together. Additionally, they may be using GA to track actions through an app, for example, or steps in a marketing process. This solution might generally work for individual blogs, but it gets hairy as your needs get more complex. And, as it turns out, the spam issues become more frustrating the more complex your setup gets.
soci 10y ago
I found a guide to get rid of all referral and language spam in GAnalytics. So far, works perfect for me. It filters out past spammy data and also adds a new View to start tracking data without all the spam. https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-traffic-in-google-analytics/ https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-tr...
codedokode 10y ago
I do not understand how domains like ɢoogle (with some unicode G-like character) are registered? I remember when IDN were introduced there were concerns about spoofing similar URLs and there were some restrictions on what characters are allowed. So now the owner of ɢoogle can add a signup form and start phishing for Google Accounts? And I am sure Mr. Trump has no relation to this spam. Obviously it is done to turn people against him.
soared 10y ago
I work at a digital marketing agency and recently had to deal with this. (I also wrote two blog posts on it, currently unpublished). I have access to ~50 properties in google analytics from work and personal accounts. About 35 of them were affected. I couldn't discern a pattern on size or type of website. Very interesting how widespread this was, but very very easy to filter out. It takes 2 seconds to filter this type of spam from appearing. A side note though, the author is incorrect on point #3 of how he expects future spam to behave. This spam is not sent with bots clicking on links acting like user. Spammers use the measurement protocol [1] to post data to randomly-ish generated universal analytics ids. So they take that referral/utm data and continuously post it to random UA-IDs until they are successful, then hit that ID much harder. Previously you could get around this by making your first property (GA structure is a tree, account > property > view, where you can have multiple properties and views) a shell. You'd never use the first property and only the second or third because then your UA-ID goes from 5575393 to 5575393-2. That "-2" previously wasn't attacked. [1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
alxmdev 10y ago
> Lifehacкer.com mimicked lifehacker.com with the only difference in Cyrillic letter ‘к’ instead of Latin ‘k’ used in the original traffic source. The substitution was obscure. The Wikipedia article "IDN homograph attack" describes various ways in which web browsers and ICANN try to protect users against this sort of shenanigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending_against_the_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending...
cypherpunks01 10y ago
Why was the HN title moderated (presumably) from lifehacкer.com to lifehacker.com?
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  The title is normalized automatically, I think, to prevent phishing or something.
chinathrow 10y ago
I deal with this Vitaly on a daily base. Google failed to block him for months - it would be so easy though. He hits / on my sites but we never ever serve Google Analytics in this URL, only from /<lang>. Hence all IPs logging pageviews on / are 100% spam. No false positives.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Yes, the last time I have his spam is Dec 23, and it changes the text, the o-o-o-h shell and vitaly etc etc Google's failure to block the spam is huge considering all the money they make is via adverts and having GA is critical to their $$$
bhouston 10y ago
Can not google just figure out this is analytics spam? I suspect a similar filter to like what determines spam email can be used? Basically a bunch of rules would look for similar referrals popping up all over the place and are invalid.
driverdan 10y ago
> Poor user behavior metrics in Google Analytics negatively affected website ranking in Google organic search results. Is this actually true? Does anyone have a primary source for this?
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  No it's not true because this referral spam never touches your server. Google does measure bounce rate when you come from Google search results, but this is entirely different scenario.
jffry 10y ago
I was reading along, about four paragraphs in, and then I was accosted by a modal dialog: "Get Your Copy of "AdWords for B2B"" Maybe your article is useful, maybe not, I don't know because I closed the tab, but screw you and your asshole design[1] edit: No seriously, take a step back and look at your website in a mirror [2]. Popping up _another_ nag as I keep scrolling down? Lord almighty, you've motivated me to blackhole your domain in /etc/hosts [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/ [2] http://imgur.com/a/Hgq9S http://imgur.com/a/Hgq9S
- herbst 10y ago
  She is also spamming reddit badly and then answers with things like "this is not spam" "i am a girl btw". I blacklisted the site.
  - NonMathGirl 10y ago
    It looks like you have troubles with me. I apologize if I made you feel insecure and victimized. Sorry again, dude.
aakarpost 10y ago
If you want to clean up your historical data in Analytics, you can create a segment and block the language spam. \s[^s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|, Go to Audience Overview > Add Segment > New Segment > Conditions > Select Language > Select Matches Regex & enter the above regex. Select Session & Exclude, give it a name and hit save. Congratulations, now your historical data is clean.
snowwrestler 10y ago
I have been able to thoroughly block referrer spam by simply setting a custom segment that only passes traffic that exactly matches my site's hostname. Does this not work for everyone? EDIT: I see some comments with advice to set a regex filter. BE CAREFUL WITH GA FILTERS. They discard traffic permanently! If you misconfigure one, you could lose real traffic data and never get it back. This is why I generally prefer to use custom segments, which hide but do not discard traffic. However, I have to remember to set the segment(s) manually. If you want to use filters, create a new view and set the filter there. Keep your original view as a backup. Best practice with GA is to create two views when you first set it up. Call one "All Data" and don't touch it. Call the other something like "Reporting" and set filters etc there. That way you always have a "backup" set of data.
ericdykstra 10y ago
I use Clicky as my default analytics tool for a new site. It filters out referral spam automatically which, by itself, justifies the $10/mo for the basic plan (which covers multiple sites). http://clicky.com http://clicky.com or http://clicky.com/100950546 http://clicky.com/100950546 if you want to use my referral link. Referral spam is just a waste of time, and if a site like Clicky can fight it effectively, I don't see why my Google Analytics is constantly littered with it. Gmail's spam filter is amazing, but their referral spam filter seems non-existent.
obsads 10y ago
That's is the big problem in the cyber market, a fake referral spam traffic grab from lifehacker.com. That's problem face by my working site. https://www.obsads.com/ https://www.obsads.com/ Solve the problem simply. 1. Go to analytics 2. make a separate spam traffic filter 3. and put on the exact url and save it.
revelation 10y ago
So someone is sending fake referrers that get into peoples favorite hidden data collection tool, and these people have summarily complained here. And I'm supposed to care? Who knew, vacuuming up data from your visitors may not be all its made up to be. Someone should hand this guy a medal. I should look and figure out if browser extensions can manipulate the referrer yet, spamming all those trackers and analytics services with fake data seems like a wonderful idea.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
I've dropped GA and all other Google services from my sites specifically because of their inaction in fixing this problem. They know what the spam domains are. They should be filtered automatically.
akerro 10y ago
They don't get into Piwik. https://piwik.org/ https://piwik.org/
bhartzer 10y ago
Sure, we can filter it out, but the real question is, “when will Google take care of referral spam?”. Referral spam has been plaguing Google Analytics for a few years now. For some websites (with less than 100 visitors a day) it’s gotten so bad that it’s almost making Google Analytics completely useless now.
jgalt212 10y ago
Unicode domain names are just a bad idea.
herbst 10y ago
Ih god. Not only are you spamming reddit but also here. (Sorry guys for the unfriendly comment but the same name on reddit is basically a spam my articles account)
- NonMathGirl 10y ago
  Your persistence in leaving comments here and there for my humble blog post is incredible!

185 points by NonMathGirl 10y ago

"Error establishing a database connection" Looks like HN traffic took it down. Here's Google's cached verson (Archive.org didn't have it): https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cC67C6lKYBYJ:kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cC67C6...

zhego 10y ago
Their website is live again http://kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics/ http://kraftblick.com/blog/referral-spam-in-google-analytics...

nodesocket 10y ago

I had also gotten absolutely swamped in Google Analytics with things like: Language: Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump! o-o-8-o-o.com search shell is much better than google! Vitaly rules google *:｡゜ﾟ･*ヽ(^ᴗ^)ﾉ*･゜ﾟ｡:* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯(ಠ益ಠ)(ಥ‿ಥ)(ʘ‿ʘ)ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ヽ(ﾟДﾟ)ﾉʕ•̫͡•ʔᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ(=^ ^=)oO Google officially recommends o-o-8-o-o.com search shell! However, I recently applied the following account level filter and seems to have helped a ton. I can't guarantee this will 100% work, but it has certainly helped. http://imgur.com/a/z9gSg http://imgur.com/a/z9gSg EDIT: Here is the regex so you can copy and paste it: \s[^\s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,

chinathrow 10y ago
I see the same spam. At this point I think the filtering by the average GA user base costs Google way more CPU cycles than an overall firewall ruleset.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Wait a day. The filter only affects traffic after it was applied.

faitswulff 10y ago

Note that the "k" is a Cyrillic "к" and the trick is to get analytics users to click referral spam: > Referral (or ghost) spam wasn’t that innocent. Curious marketers and web analysts checked domains they supposedly got traffic from. Referrers got them transferred to trashy websites with ads, viruses or porn. > ...[Vitaly] needed software to get his websites into people’s analytics reports. His words were “if only one out of 1000 people click the link to see who these referrers are, I’ll gain profit.” I just installed Google Analytics on my site and saw these weird referrers, and my site is quite obscure. Seems like this could be a widespread problem. There's also a fix in the article from Georgi Georgiev: http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-google-analytics-spam/ http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-... > Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Admin -> Filters area. Add a new filter with the following settings. Make sure you have the “Edit” access at the “Account” level in Google Analytics. Remember that the filter will eliminate traffic hits where the language dimension contains 15 or more symbols. > Filter Pattern is .{15,}|\s[^\s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/.

soared 10y ago
Any guesses on the value of the "google.com" with the Cyrillic G? I'd say $1MM.
- notatoad 10y ago
  i thought that when icann allowed non-latin characters in URLs, they were going to limit it to only the ccTLD where those characters were in common usage - so ԍooԍle.ru would be valid, but ԍooԍle.com wouldn't be registerable. am i misremembering, or did that plan change? this just seems like a phishing nightmare.
  - 086421357909764 10y ago
    I actually just ran a query on a domain using Google Domains and was offered a .com variant of an existing domain with the only difference, the letter c with a Hacek (Ĉ). Phishing nightmare indeed.
- 10y ago

ifrins 10y ago

I also receive all sorts of spam hits on Google Analytics accounts. My suggestion is to create a filter that only includes the traffic directed to your hostname. It filters pretty much everything. But it's another problem in mobile apps tracking. I've yet to find a solution on mobile. Any suggestions?

t3ra 10y ago

Isn't cloudflare blocking this spam? Because I was managing a WordPress site for a client behind cloudflare and they were still able to spam usi g this technique

hbcondo714 10y ago
No, the referal spam never hits the website. It instead goes straight to GA.
- soared 10y ago
  hbcondo714 is correct, nothing every actually touches your website. Its send with the measurement protocol, which allows you to POST data straight to GA. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
- klenwell 10y ago
  This is the detail that the article seemed to miss. Or did I miss it?
partiallypro 10y ago
Cloudflare does block some spammers, and marks them as "bad browser." But it doesn't catch all types of spam attacks. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-What-does-the-Browser-Integrity-Check-do- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170086-W...

shortformblog 10y ago

This has been written about a few places, including Motherboard (where, full disclosure, I contribute): https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-pro-trump-russian-is-spamming-google-analytics https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-pro-trump-russian-is-... Not long after doing the interview with Vitaly, they had to write a follow-up because the original article ended up being used as GA spam: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spammer-now-spamming-google-analytics-with-motherboard-article-on-spam http://motherboard.vice.com/read/spammer-now-spamming-google... That cycle has repeated itself a few times (The Next Web ran into something similar a month prior). To be honest, the real problem here, far as I can tell, is that Google hasn't figured out a way to make whitelisting traffic easy in Analytics. Most people don't use a tenth of GA's overall power, and as a result have no idea where to look when it comes to building out filters and such. Yes, those who seriously do analytics for a living know how to handle this, but the problem is, there are a lot of people who use GA because it "just works," and it doesn't do the job if someone's just throwing junk into the referrers. This problem is widespread and it depreciates the value of a fundamental Google product. Why is a company that's so good at filtering spam apparently ignoring the problem in this case?

thewhitetulip 10y ago
Exactly, I started using GA a few months back, have no clue how to filter this out.
- marktangotango 10y ago
  Add a filter that only allows data from your domain. I found this on a spammy content marketing site somewhere. I added this and haven't seen any referral spam since. I'm not sure what the pros and cons are, maybe someone here can elucidate? In GA: Admin -> All Filters -> Add Filter -> Predefined Filter Type -> Include Only -> Traffic to the hostname -> tha contains -> Enter your hostname in the text box ie mysite.com.
  - shortformblog 10y ago
    The fact that there are eight steps to get to your suggested solution only underlines my point that Google needs to create a simple solution to this problem. It should be three steps, tops. That said, there are some weaknesses to this solution. Here's why: For larger businesses, they may have multiple websites, and those websites may need to work together. Additionally, they may be using GA to track actions through an app, for example, or steps in a marketing process. This solution might generally work for individual blogs, but it gets hairy as your needs get more complex. And, as it turns out, the spam issues become more frustrating the more complex your setup gets.

soci 10y ago

I found a guide to get rid of all referral and language spam in GAnalytics. So far, works perfect for me. It filters out past spammy data and also adds a new View to start tracking data without all the spam. https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-traffic-in-google-analytics/ https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-tr...

codedokode 10y ago

I do not understand how domains like ɢoogle (with some unicode G-like character) are registered? I remember when IDN were introduced there were concerns about spoofing similar URLs and there were some restrictions on what characters are allowed. So now the owner of ɢoogle can add a signup form and start phishing for Google Accounts? And I am sure Mr. Trump has no relation to this spam. Obviously it is done to turn people against him.

soared 10y ago

I work at a digital marketing agency and recently had to deal with this. (I also wrote two blog posts on it, currently unpublished). I have access to ~50 properties in google analytics from work and personal accounts. About 35 of them were affected. I couldn't discern a pattern on size or type of website. Very interesting how widespread this was, but very very easy to filter out. It takes 2 seconds to filter this type of spam from appearing. A side note though, the author is incorrect on point #3 of how he expects future spam to behave. This spam is not sent with bots clicking on links acting like user. Spammers use the measurement protocol [1] to post data to randomly-ish generated universal analytics ids. So they take that referral/utm data and continuously post it to random UA-IDs until they are successful, then hit that ID much harder. Previously you could get around this by making your first property (GA structure is a tree, account > property > view, where you can have multiple properties and views) a shell. You'd never use the first property and only the second or third because then your UA-ID goes from 5575393 to 5575393-2. That "-2" previously wasn't attacked. [1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

alxmdev 10y ago

> Lifehacкer.com mimicked lifehacker.com with the only difference in Cyrillic letter ‘к’ instead of Latin ‘k’ used in the original traffic source. The substitution was obscure. The Wikipedia article "IDN homograph attack" describes various ways in which web browsers and ICANN try to protect users against this sort of shenanigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending_against_the_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending...

cypherpunks01 10y ago

Why was the HN title moderated (presumably) from lifehacкer.com to lifehacker.com?

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
The title is normalized automatically, I think, to prevent phishing or something.

chinathrow 10y ago

I deal with this Vitaly on a daily base. Google failed to block him for months - it would be so easy though. He hits / on my sites but we never ever serve Google Analytics in this URL, only from /<lang>. Hence all IPs logging pageviews on / are 100% spam. No false positives.

thewhitetulip 10y ago
Yes, the last time I have his spam is Dec 23, and it changes the text, the o-o-o-h shell and vitaly etc etc Google's failure to block the spam is huge considering all the money they make is via adverts and having GA is critical to their $$$

bhouston 10y ago

Can not google just figure out this is analytics spam? I suspect a similar filter to like what determines spam email can be used? Basically a bunch of rules would look for similar referrals popping up all over the place and are invalid.

driverdan 10y ago

> Poor user behavior metrics in Google Analytics negatively affected website ranking in Google organic search results. Is this actually true? Does anyone have a primary source for this?

angry-hacker 10y ago
No it's not true because this referral spam never touches your server. Google does measure bounce rate when you come from Google search results, but this is entirely different scenario.

jffry 10y ago

I was reading along, about four paragraphs in, and then I was accosted by a modal dialog: "Get Your Copy of "AdWords for B2B"" Maybe your article is useful, maybe not, I don't know because I closed the tab, but screw you and your asshole design[1] edit: No seriously, take a step back and look at your website in a mirror [2]. Popping up _another_ nag as I keep scrolling down? Lord almighty, you've motivated me to blackhole your domain in /etc/hosts [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/ [2] http://imgur.com/a/Hgq9S http://imgur.com/a/Hgq9S

herbst 10y ago
She is also spamming reddit badly and then answers with things like "this is not spam" "i am a girl btw". I blacklisted the site.
- NonMathGirl 10y ago
  It looks like you have troubles with me. I apologize if I made you feel insecure and victimized. Sorry again, dude.

aakarpost 10y ago

If you want to clean up your historical data in Analytics, you can create a segment and block the language spam. \s[^s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|, Go to Audience Overview > Add Segment > New Segment > Conditions > Select Language > Select Matches Regex & enter the above regex. Select Session & Exclude, give it a name and hit save. Congratulations, now your historical data is clean.

snowwrestler 10y ago

I have been able to thoroughly block referrer spam by simply setting a custom segment that only passes traffic that exactly matches my site's hostname. Does this not work for everyone? EDIT: I see some comments with advice to set a regex filter. BE CAREFUL WITH GA FILTERS. They discard traffic permanently! If you misconfigure one, you could lose real traffic data and never get it back. This is why I generally prefer to use custom segments, which hide but do not discard traffic. However, I have to remember to set the segment(s) manually. If you want to use filters, create a new view and set the filter there. Keep your original view as a backup. Best practice with GA is to create two views when you first set it up. Call one "All Data" and don't touch it. Call the other something like "Reporting" and set filters etc there. That way you always have a "backup" set of data.

ericdykstra 10y ago

I use Clicky as my default analytics tool for a new site. It filters out referral spam automatically which, by itself, justifies the $10/mo for the basic plan (which covers multiple sites). http://clicky.com http://clicky.com or http://clicky.com/100950546 http://clicky.com/100950546 if you want to use my referral link. Referral spam is just a waste of time, and if a site like Clicky can fight it effectively, I don't see why my Google Analytics is constantly littered with it. Gmail's spam filter is amazing, but their referral spam filter seems non-existent.

obsads 10y ago

That's is the big problem in the cyber market, a fake referral spam traffic grab from lifehacker.com. That's problem face by my working site. https://www.obsads.com/ https://www.obsads.com/ Solve the problem simply. 1. Go to analytics 2. make a separate spam traffic filter 3. and put on the exact url and save it.

revelation 10y ago

So someone is sending fake referrers that get into peoples favorite hidden data collection tool, and these people have summarily complained here. And I'm supposed to care? Who knew, vacuuming up data from your visitors may not be all its made up to be. Someone should hand this guy a medal. I should look and figure out if browser extensions can manipulate the referrer yet, spamming all those trackers and analytics services with fake data seems like a wonderful idea.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

I've dropped GA and all other Google services from my sites specifically because of their inaction in fixing this problem. They know what the spam domains are. They should be filtered automatically.

akerro 10y ago

They don't get into Piwik. https://piwik.org/ https://piwik.org/

bhartzer 10y ago

Sure, we can filter it out, but the real question is, “when will Google take care of referral spam?”. Referral spam has been plaguing Google Analytics for a few years now. For some websites (with less than 100 visitors a day) it’s gotten so bad that it’s almost making Google Analytics completely useless now.

jgalt212 10y ago

Unicode domain names are just a bad idea.

herbst 10y ago

Ih god. Not only are you spamming reddit but also here. (Sorry guys for the unfriendly comment but the same name on reddit is basically a spam my articles account)

NonMathGirl 10y ago
Your persistence in leaving comments here and there for my humble blog post is incredible!