Google Analytics Garbage Refferals?
 

Hey everyone,

For the past month or so I've noticed weird referrals showing up in analytics.

buttons-for-websites and other weird shit. Saw another new one today called humanorightswatch dot org. Did a whois on it, seems to be related to the other names, all from russia it seems.

Whenever I am in live mode and check locations it's samsara or some place like that in Russian.

I go to content, to see which page they are on of mine, and they are never actually on one of my pages. The title always shows as something that's not even on my website.

Anyone know what this is all about? What's the point of it? Seems like it's just to mess with someones analitic stats, but I don't know. You guys noticed anything weird like that?

I have not seen any weird stuff like that in my analytics.

Every site of mine has referrals from "buttons-to-websites" site, I heard it's some spider bot type thing and probably better to have host block that traffic.

Search here in GFY, there was a thread with more response on this topic a couple of weeks ago.

what's the URL this is happening on?

Maybe a spam bot, looking for public web stats with referrers?

Add this to your .htaccess

Hope this helps.

You can try blocking them in .htaccess, but that won't have any effect on the ones which are not even visiting your site. Read this article below to see how these referrers are appearing in your GA stats without actually visiting you:

[Updated] darodar.com referrer spam and should you be worried? - blackMORE Ops


This quote from the article above pretty much sums it up (example using darodar.com):


You can set up a filter to remove these types of referrals from your stats in GA. Other than that, there isn't that much you can do about them.

Yes, that's exactly right and .htaccess won't help spoofing of GA code.

I have seen this on sites not using G-A.
The same referrer shows up on Piwik stats.
It is forging the Piwik JS codes also then?

Because the exploit is hit and miss with the code forged -- how would you track the sites that you cracked the code for?

How would this scam be monetized?

Uugh I can't believe you posted that here. I was gonna help this guy via pm this morning.
I purposely did not respond to this because that info is not good for certain people here to know :(

I hear you. But the cat is already out of the bag as far as GA referrer spam goes.

There are tons of articles about it all over the place.

I'm not losing sleep over a few turds from GFY who might get a bright idea to join in on the bandwagon all of a sudden.

Maybe if things get bad enough, then Google will finally do something about it. :winkwink:

Have you blocked these referrers in .htaccess, and they are still appearing in your Piwik stats?

Yeah I don't think they are on site, they are more just screwing with peoples GA stats.. I don't know why though, what would be the point of this?

preparing the ground for something bigger ?

Because they have nothing better to do?

No, they are on noticed on some personal sites of mine ... (honeypots ;0))

On our main company websites they amount to 0.00785% of referrers (this week). For reason of the minuscule number of hits, I have more important things to have our network guys look into. I see more unusual (concerning) exploits all the time.

We don't use Apache.

I still think this may be more than attempting to block the ''Bogeyman."

Perhaps consequential, there is a cross match of Facebook referrals for(links)/to the domains I found affected. Before we go down the road of "Facebook is Evil!" it may be that this bot is scraping links from Facebook and reaching the domains affected?

I went to that buttons-for-website and it set off my Avast.

Clicks from webmasters.

No, the pattern I am seeing is one on many domains where that could be or not be the motive. I see no reason to believe that.

Could it is a simple as "Fucking with Google is fun?" This whole thing seems mindless at this point. If there is a hidden motive -- it is well hidden. There are too few domains being used where a regex to filter out the spam would present problems for the 'glorious' Google engineers to deal with.

Again, this whole thing seems mindless at this point ...

they spam referral lists. people visit the sites out of curiosity. bad shit gets installed on your computer. seems simple to me.

I have been blocking them by ip

htaccess won't help long. I set up filters directly in GA. Then it will be quiet for some time until the next guy starts his referral spam campaign. The only real solution is that Google finds a way to stop it. But they either can't or don't give a fuck.