Fixing unknown referrals in Google Analytics or what it is called Log Spam, Referrer spam or Referrer Bombing…

murshed ahmmad khan (usamurai) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:30:01 +0000

While checking my site statistics in Google Analytics in the “Traffic Sources” >> “All Traffic sources” tab I’ve found some suspicious domain names as the referral of my site… such as

camera-digital.golbnet.com / referral
mouse-e-teclado.golbnet.com / referral
dvd-cd.golbnet.com / referral

referral spam shown as red mark

what is a Referrer Spam?
After a quick check, it became obvious that none of the sites actually don’t have any actual referring links to my site but the things might call Log Spam, Referrer spam or Referrer Bombing. From Google Analytics forum,

It is a method of attracting direct visits from a webmasters, faking traffic for a paid-for-inclusion-directories or annoy webmasters by posting fake message or fake keywords. Also old public stats programs like Webaliser or AWStats showed a backlink to the faked referrer which had SEO benefits for the spammer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam (Note: GA is defaulted to private, so referrers are not publicly posted, as far as I am aware). http://www.nickycakes.com/fake-your-referer-get-more-traffic/

But be known that spam referrals will NOT affect the site’s search engine positions (SERP`s), these 2 issues are COMPLETELY unrelated.

How the spammers do it?
The spammers can collect the GA accountID`s (e.g UA-0000000-1) in a number of ways and then can paste these accountID found above into GA tracking code hosted on their domains e.g. camera-digital.golbnet.com and then can send traffic to these internal pages. It happens as any webpage that has the tracking code of your Analytics account installed on it will be tracked by your Analytics account. This is irrespective of whether it is your domain or not. The only way to stop tracking the page would be to remove the code from it by contacting with the site owner.

How to check whether you are affected by this:
1. Go to “visitors tab” >> “network properties” > “hostnames” and look for gps-brasil.blogspot.com or any unknown domains, e.g. If you see sites listed within hostnames are something like
thebesthosting .org / gps-brasil.blogspot .com / notebooks-brasil.blogspot .com / www.web .com

The list hostnames shows the unknown domains calling my GA Id

2. Search for allintext:UA-0000000 or “UA-0000000″ on google (you can even setup a google alert to be notified if google finds a site your accountID) – To check for if anyone using your exact GA Id -

http://www.google.com/search?q=allintext%3AUA-10005&filter=0&num=100

3. Do a “Site Search” in the suspected site. e.g. do a site search on gps-brasil.blogspot.com to find the page with your accountID.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&num=100&q=site%3Agps-brasil.blogspot.com&filter=0&num=100

How to Fix this:
Add an include Hostname filter for youdomain.com to prevent faked visits from thebesthosting .org and others.

Filter Type:
Advanced > INCLUDE
hostname:youdomain.com
case sensitive: no

Include filter by hostname

IMPORTANT: it is best to have a backup profile with no filters applied. Thus if you accidentally clicked the “exclude” button rather than “include” or mistyped you domain name, then no traffic would be included, so be careful with filters using the hostname field.

* google cache, MSN translate visits will also be shown in the hostname report. This is because when a user views the cache of your page, the tracking code still runs, but this is hosted on google servers not your hostname.

references:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=1a9b2f4d4b3688a8&hl=en&fid=1a9b2f4d4b3688a800046ec3c41c2599&hltp=2

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=0d32da2b9b6fcabe&hl=en

What is a website profile in Google Analytics

seo: know the secrets of sitelinks in google search results

murshed ahmmad khan (usamurai) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:53:55 +0000

at first, what is actually a snippet and sitelinks in terms of google search result? from seo weekly…

“The snippet is the 2-line summary that appears along with the link to the website. Sitelinks are additional links to deeper pages or directories within the main site that is listed at number one for the search term.”

if you search with the term “somewhereinblog” in google, you will see google sorted up some sitelinks for you(see the screen shot below).

snippet & sitelinks of a normal search result

let’s look at another example…

sitelinks result for facebook

viewing the sitelinks in the result, some questions quickly ran through in my mind and finally i got the answers which i would like to share with you all.

1. question #1: can i set such links for my other sites also?

snippets are automatically generated. so you can’t place them by paying money.
sites with traffic levels above a certain level are usually listed with snippets.
sites with high traffic might not include snippets in the listing if the most relevant page being served is not the homepage.

so somewhereinblog has good traffic. sitelinks for other sites is subject to the traffic, you can do nothing here other than trying to increase the traffic of your site.

2. question #2: can i customize the sitelinks ?i want to place some other links say “groups”, “bangla settings”, “kono somosha” etc. under the result rather than showing some other less important links.

the google snippets’ sitelinks are usually the most popular links as determined by visitor usage ( it collects site usage data via google analytics, google toolbar etc.).
so i can’t add my favorite links here… it is created automatically based on popularity to help the users to go there directly.

3. question #3: but i don’t like some links anyway… can i remove the links that i dislike ?

if you think that the sitelinks displayed for your site are inappropriate or incorrect, you can block them so that they no longer appear(from “webmaster tools”).
it’s also notable that google only display sitelinks when a site has a minimum of three sitelinks available. if you have two or fewer unblocked sitelinks, no sitelinks at all will appear in google search results for your site.

4. question #4: hmm, i know about my site better than you. you should have the feature of adding links also… grrrr…

in the google webmasters/site owners help page for sitelinks, they wrote…

at the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. we’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

so, now things are pretty clear to me. not bad at all. but getting the right answers need me to search several times in several ways. so i thought it would be better to share it with you all. may be you also find it interesting.

thank you all .

references: *** interested people can read these articles too…

N.B. it’s a pretty old note. posting lately .

exploring the IT underworld » seo

Fixing unknown referrals in Google Analytics or what it is called Log Spam, Referrer spam or Referrer Bombing…

seo: know the secrets of sitelinks in google search results