Recently my associates and I have been seeing something in our Google Analytics reports we now know to call referrer spam. This post very neatly documents all the particulars of this latest ploy. In the article the author recommends not visiting the oddball referring sites, which is a rather irresistible thing to do as a web analyst. It is our very nature to visit new referring sites to see how our content is being referred to, etc. Bad news is, the way the perps are going about this, you won’t ever find any links to your site on these referring sites. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before there is a clever response from the web analytics community or from the analytics providers themselves. Time for another game of cat and mouse, unfortunately; and, a good reason to frequently review your web analytics reporting!
Update: more information is available at this post, and includes other links you may find in your reports. I am not mentioning specific domains because they are listed in the posts I’m linking to, and I don’t want to give them any more attention since the attention they’ve earned was ill-gotten to begin with.
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