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Ask HN: Why do I get so much traffic from random spam websites

5 points by taigeair ↗ HN
Looking at my GA, I see I'm getting lots of traffic from random spammy websites. Do you know why this is?

e.g. floating-share-buttons.com and 100dollars-seo.com

How can I stop this?

Thanks, http://cl.ly/image/1K2Q1r381f2l

6 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 23.2 ms ] thread
jjgreen
They hope you will publish the URLs (which you have) :-(
MarkCole
This is a technique called referrer spam. It's not real traffic just a way to get you as the owner of your site to visit theirs and "hopefully" purchase whatever they're trying to sell.

If you wish to clean up your reports the only real way to do it is using filters[0]. Or optionally switching to a different analytics provider.

[0] http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2015/howto-fix-ghost-traff...

taigeair
I see. I can filter it out but is there any way to stop it? Thanks,
tehwebguy
Yes, you can filter it at the GA level or block it server-side but some of it can only be blocked at the GA level (because they are sending a fake ping to Google with your GA ID, rather than crawling your website)
gesman
They are actually hitting the website. I don't use GA (I wrote my own analytics) and that's what i see in logs.
nsuQAEsax
Really long time ago I found a similar behavior in one of my sites. And it was because I had Awstats publicly accessible and they were interested in put their link in the page as it was indexed by Google.