When you register a Google Analytics account, you are assigned a tracking ID. This method works because of how Google Analytics itself works. Historical data is very important, so you don’t want to cut off all data. This first trick works for new websites, but it won’t work for established sites because it would change your analytics history completely. In the mean time, it’s up to us webmasters to work out a solution that works well enough. ![]() They’re working on a solution, but it’s a very complex problem and it’s difficult to filter and block without breaking analytics for legitimate users. Google knows and understands referral spam. If you don’t know how to handle malicious sites, you could end up infected with something, which can compromise all sorts of data, from your site to your bank accounts. Not only is it dangerous to have these as referrers in your analytics it’s dangerous to click them. It just redirects you to an affiliate shopping cart, or a spam site of some description, or even to a malware spam download or malicious script execute page. If you are, you’ll be curious as to why this site is linking to you, and you’ll click to visit it. Why would a spammer do this? They want to see if you’re paying attention to your analytics. ![]() The sites that show up in your analytics typically show up because they have linked to you and someone has followed that link. This is how you end up with fake referrers in your site analytics. They can do this because they know how HTTP works and they know how to ping Google’s analytics script. There are also some bots, called referral bots, that can send data directly to your Google Analytics without ever actually visiting your site. Botnets are how DDoS attacks happen most commonly. The owner of the botnet can issue a command, and every internet-enabled computer infected will execute that command. Botnets are typically made up of computers infected by a virus. A botnet is a network of bots controlled by one person, often numbering in the thousands of computers. Some bad bots even fall under the heading of a botnet. Some want to register accounts or leave spam comments. They don’t necessarily execute scripts, but some of them do, because they want to see your page as it is displayed to a user, or need scripts to accomplish their goals. You never know they’re there.īad bots ignore robots.txt. If they don’t execute scripts, they don’t trigger Google Analytics, and thus won’t show up in your reports at all. Many of them don’t even execute JavaScript, which is fine. Good bots often tend to pay attention to your site robots.txt file. Google’s search crawlers are good, because without them your content would never enter the search results, which would leave your business stuck with nowhere to go. These are at worst unimportant, and at best actively beneficial to you. On the good side, you have bots like the Googlebot. Of course, they’re also impossible to completely ban them away. They’re not all good, and they’re not all bad, so banning them across the board isn’t a good idea. A script that visits a page, pulls a piece of data, and leaves is a bit. Technically, any visit from a piece of software without a human involved is a bot. There are a bunch of different kinds of bots. Different forms require different solutions, so let’s take a look at what’s going on. “Bad traffic” comes in many forms, some more malicious than others. Your bounce rate will look higher, your time on site will look lower, your demographics will be skewed, and your referrers will be incorrect. ![]() If you’re recording a lot of data about fake users, though, you end up with incorrect metrics. This allows you to get an idea of where your traffic is located, how it’s performing, and how you can improve it overall. Why is this? Google Analytics tracks a lot of data about users who visit your site. The only place that fake traffic typically hurts you is within Google Analytics. Spammers don’t go around trying to kill the accounts of other users. If it’s all targeting your ads and clicking on them, you might be removed from AdWords or another ad program for click fraud, but generally bots aren’t going to do that. Thankfully, fake traffic isn’t detrimental to your site in general. You can’t block spammers without blocking legit users, so you just have to deal with it. Try to block them and you’ll end up blocking some legitimate traffic, and the bots use rotating IPs anyways. There are thousands of bots crawling around the web at any given moment, many of which use shared IPs or the IPs of important referrers. Fake traffic is impossible to stop coming into your website.
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