5 ms·

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 ma

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.
- DenisM 10y ago
  There's also Cyrillic o / о and e / е. And l can be substituted for the capital I or the digit 1. We're looking at quite a few different fake "google" domains. I doubt any of them will be worth a million bucks, they are not that scarce unless someone registeres all of them at once to squeeze the market.
- mutatio 10y ago
  Probably < $0. It's a deceptive domain of a strongly contested trademark - all the Unicode variants are probably just burner domains.
- csydas 10y ago
  Probably not much cause it'd look like гоогle.com or something else silly. The Cyrillic g character would stand out and most Russians would go to yandex before Google so accidental Russian traffic would be barely worth the effort. The print form of cyrillic that would be used in browsers just doesn't have a character to make the domain worth anything. The vowels on the other hand look the same. ОO, eе, аa.
newman314 10y ago
Couple more links that I have found useful. * 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... * https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-... * http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/ http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-t...

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.
DenisM 10y ago
There's also Cyrillic o / о and e / е. And l can be substituted for the capital I or the digit 1. We're looking at quite a few different fake "google" domains. I doubt any of them will be worth a million bucks, they are not that scarce unless someone registeres all of them at once to squeeze the market.
mutatio 10y ago
Probably < $0. It's a deceptive domain of a strongly contested trademark - all the Unicode variants are probably just burner domains.
csydas 10y ago
Probably not much cause it'd look like гоогle.com or something else silly. The Cyrillic g character would stand out and most Russians would go to yandex before Google so accidental Russian traffic would be barely worth the effort. The print form of cyrillic that would be used in browsers just doesn't have a character to make the domain worth anything. The vowels on the other hand look the same. ОO, eе, аa.

newman314 10y ago

Couple more links that I have found useful. * 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... * https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-... * http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/ http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-t...