This is what is known as Referral Spam.
Referral spam will show up as strange site address's, or address that don't make sense as referral sources, in your Google Analyics reports under Acquisition.
Typically you can recognise them by referring sites listed that have all or one of the following:
- A url with a phrase to do with making money, social something, free things or SEO
- A url that has numbers in it that don't make sense
- the domain name is not one you recognise and would not be one that has or would ever have a link to your site from. Dodgy SEO's will register your site on "1000's" of directories and sites not related to yours so it could be one of those - but they don't provide any benefit anyway.
Common and persistant annoying spammers include:
- semalt.com (and variations on the semalt domain) though Google has shut this one down recently
- buttons-for-website.com (and variations on the buttons theme) including share-buttons or free-share-buttons or social-buttons
- social-traffic and a range of sites with a .xyz at the end
- copyrightclaims.org
- traffic2cash
- best-seo-offer, sucdess-seo and variations on the seo
What causes this referral spam ?
Referral spam or log spam is fake traffic generated by websites that are not related to your own.
These websites can automate fake visits in a variety of ways, including automating 'robot' visits, and hijacking your analytics ID. But the end result is the same - Google Analytics reports these as visits to your site.
So why should you care?
Their underhand purposes includes increasing the referral site's search engine ranking (by getting backlinks in your site logs). If you've ever heard of Black Hat SEO - this is a Black Hat technique. One that manipulates results and perverts the intention of Google which is to help users find quality sites.
It is unethical and a form of cheating. It is not clever or part of the game and, like email spam, it gets in the way of everyone else because it makes getting decent search results harder.
Another reason is to trick people into visiting their site to inflate their visitors numbers (to attract advertisers) or in some cases malicious actions like attempting to get you to download malicious code.
What can I do about it?
Don't worry too much about it because it isn't likely to be a direct attack on your site. It is not a reflection on your site or it's security.
Do NOT, out of curiousity, go and visit the site to see who it is. That just serves their purpose.
You can ignore it if it the numbers aren't particularly high.
There are technical ways to block it if you are really serious about it - you should talk to your web developer/technical support on how to do it because the solution depends on your setup.
You can setup filters in Google Analytics to filter them out if you are concerned about what it is doing to your stats. But actual numbers mean little in website analytics anyway because of the number of random factors that can pervert the accuracy.
This is why we recommend focusing on trends and REAL results like leads and sales.
And please, don't be tempted to contribute to the problem by engaging anyone who includes these kind of tactics for short term gain.
Update: Since the scale of this problem has increased be a serious amount, we now recommend you use a number of techniques including filters, blocking urls in your htaccess file and using custom segments to get a real picture of your website's performance.
