You may have noticed in your Google Analytics reports of sites like the infamous forex-ninjas.com sending all sorts of traffic to your site.
What's the deal with this and why is this happening? Here's what you need to know:
Basically, when you see a site like forex-ninjas.com in your Google Analytics referrers its called referrer spam. Here's how it work via a post by Martha Seroog:
- A website wants to increase its traffic artificially
- They visit your website, view your source code and grab your analytics code (yes, it's visible to anyone)
- They post your code onto their website (along with thousands of other site's codes)
- They visit their own site and ta-da...they appear in YOUR analytics report as a referring site.
What does this mean to you and what can you do about it?
You could perhaps make a filter for traffic from such sites. But so many people have noticed this that you have to believe Google is on top of this and will be putting an end to forex-ninjas.com's sneakiness.
The down part of this is that all your clients will be asking you who forex-ninjas.com is and that it may artifically inflate your reports and/or make your bounce rates look strange.
Any thoughts on how you are handling referrer spam?
p.s.: Hat tip to these excellent posts. Check them out: