Google Analytics Spam Referral Sites – What are they?

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Chuckleb

Moderator
Mar 5, 2013
1,017
331
83
Minnesota
Do you think that the spam was from GA or could it have been from your domain registrar as well? I've always been curious where lists are created from.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
This has been around long before GA was invented.

The reason this spam started was that many people had public facing stats software, so refer spamming like this created 1000s of free back links to the spammers site and these links were generated by the stats software the site owner had no control over. (Other than they should have made their stats private / behind a password directory at the min.) This is still working today on 2nd rate search engines, and sadly many people still have public facing stats that keep this type of spam alive alive well... at-least to some degree.

The 'domains to spam' list are created by spammers numerous ways. I've known some that use daily lists, others that may be 'specific' will search for certain keywords, and even others that have 'products' or 'services' geared toward site owners will make their domain names more attractive such as 'IncreaseTraffic.com' or 'WebsiteVisitors4Cash', etc... some will go so far as to monitor domain regs, then check for google adSense on the site to make sure they're targeting webmaster who already know and understand making $$$ from their websites.

Another interesting thing that used to work on forums is creating a forum and letting it get spammed to hell by the spammers, and then cleaning it up months later and adding "good" content, and then presto your site insta-ranked for terms due to the fake-spam back links created by the spammers that pointed to their spam on your site. Nowadays this is a great way to get your site in trouble, but it was rather fun in the old`n`days to watch sites go from no where to someplace without doing any advertising, etc...
 
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
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That is a very good point @T_Minus - there are folks who automatically list referring domains and give links based on that.
 

tby

Active Member
Aug 22, 2013
222
111
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Snellville, GA
set-inform.com
In the olden days many bloggers published their referrer data intentionally. As in, look at all the cool people linking to me!

Now put up a page with a comment form and see how long it takes for the bots / Ukrainians to start spamming it...