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Ask HN: Why doesn't Google Analytics fix this?

18 points by mfkp ↗ HN
All of the referrers for one of my websites show up as these spam sites, basically rendering my analytics useless.

http://puu.sh/iFhg2/6960925d38.png

Seems like they could pretty easily block/filter these sites, but I've been seeing these same sites for over a year. What gives?

8 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] thread
dalerus
It's a huge problem for us, we manage analytics on a large group of sites and reporting back to the client has become a huge pain.

We have to setup custom filters for all of these. Google does have a feature to automatically remove know sources, but it's not turned on by default. Here's the announcement: https://plus.google.com/+GoogleAnalytics/posts/2tJ79CkfnZk

We also run Piwki on all our client's websites as well and they block this junk automatically: http://piwik.org/blog/2015/05/stopping-referrer-spam/

Seth_R
Yeah we also see these on our analytics. There's a thing called spamninja that handles this, see at http://ninjaspam.com/

We will soon start working with this new analytics tool - Kilometer.io that will most chances be very good tool and a nice competitor. They now have this beta waiting list for a month at - http://www.kilometer.io

kewball
Yep GA has become mostly useless for me too. I tried checking the box for Google to automatically remove known referral spam on all of my sites but it doesn't seem to change a thing. Might not be such a problem for sites with a lot of traffic but for most of mine spam > valid traffic
mrhhug
> Why doesn't Google Analytics fix this?

fix? They are giving you the data you asked for. You can ignore web requests based on referer. Why are you sending these places data back? You are wasting bandwidth.

well......I have maintain the full stack on the sites I care about, so I would ignore based on referer, but i acknowledge not every dev has this luxury. I would be mad if a statistical analysis app fudged my numbers as default.

true_religion
In my experience GA, has proved pretty useless for sites which get less than 1,000,000 sessions per month.

If you have so few sessions that just 1000 referrals can swamp your analytics, even for a day, then GA isn't that great.

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Anyways, I'm curious... are hits from this group of sites not legitimate hits? I mean if it's not bot traffic, why should it be filtered by default. You can create your own filters.

dangrossman
> are hits from this group of sites not legitimate hits? I mean if it's not bot traffic

It is bot traffic. These aren't real visits. These sites don't actually link to anyone, they just run crawlers visiting other sites with their domain as the referrer in order to get traffic from webmasters. They sell SEO and SEO monitoring services mainly, so people looking at their web stats are their market.