Spamming Google Analytics with Back Links
Further to my recent post about the slowfoodottawagatineau.org back links in analytics I have noticed another site employing a similar technique – forex-ninjas.com or www.forex-ninjas.com
Again, traffic is coming through this new back link in the same period to several different websites and sometimes on the same day.
And again the content of the website which is ‘referring’ traffic to some of my sites is totally irrelevant.
Is forex-ninjas damaging?
As i previously suggested, I do not believe these spamming techniques to be damaging but more of an inconvenience that could alter statistics for your website and I suggest using a filter within analytics to ensure these sites do not show up again. Be sure to include both forex-ninjas.com and slowfoodottawagatineau.org in your filter.
How to filter forex-ninjas.com and slowfoodottawagatineau.org from analytics
In Google Analytics, view the profile (website) that is suffering the spam and you wish to apply the filter to and click the ‘cog’ button for the account settings in the top right.
Click the ‘Filters’ tab and then ‘+New Filter’
Give the filter a suitable name of your choice e.g. ‘forex ninjas’ or ‘Spam’ etc.
You can leave the settings as they are and simply enter the url of the site you wish to filter e.g. www.forex-ninjas.com
Make sure you apply a filter to every site which is spamming your analytics, so far I have found the following:
- slowfoodottawagatineau.org
- www.slowfoodottawagatineau.org
- forex-ninjas.com
- www.forex-ninjas.com
- www.rock.to/VeryProfitForex
Is Google aware of these tricks and what are they doing about it?
As I have mentioned before, this I do not know but am very keen to find out so if anyone has has had any correspondence with anyone at Google about this, please comment below. The same applies should anybody know of any other back link spamming sites and I will add them to the list above.
Thanks for this. I found another screwy Referral: http://www.rock.to/VeryProfitForex
I wonder how they do this and why? Almost seems like they’re just trying to get google ad impressions or clicks or something when people go to check out what they site is. Very odd.
I also have been getting a lot of backlinks from forex-ninjas.com. I tried to pull up their site, but there server seems down / overloaded, and it has been for the last two days. Any idea what their site is about?
I’ve gotten a large traffic spike across all my sites (mainly mom & pop operations how typically get less than 20 visitors per day). I’m getting about 5-10 extra hits a day on all these sites now. It definitely is messing up my statistics thanks for this.
our analytics last two days also showing 20 plus clicks a day.
me too who are these assholes and why are they doing this?
Had begun to see these show up on analytics.. Being a foodie at first I thought slow food might have been legit, when the ninja starting showing up is when I thought WTF.. Thanks for sharing having seen the rock yet.
I have dozens of sites hit by forex ninjas.
Same issue with the websites we develop my friends. Here’s a convincing explanation of why they might be doing this and how they are doing it. Cheers. http://dmjcomputerservices.com/blog/2012/01/13/forex-ninjas-in-your-analytics-you-have-referrer-spam/
These guys are basically using a robot to spam referrer logs.
One of the (supposed) benefits to them is that their site will show up on public stats for those sites that publish these. (Those using 3rd party statcounters etc.
In reality, search engines don’t give much weight to those pages that they do turn up on, so the main effect of these tactics is people like us being annoyed!