report Combo direct/referral spam incident caught on G analytics

[Fliporium]

I don't know about you guys but parking pages with no control over sucks. I'm new to the domain game but not noob enough to accept the standards of parking with others, so I parked my own pages with my own analytics. I'm not saying parking your pages with Sedo or Godaddy is bad, I'm just saying I like more control. This report here may be of interest as to explain referral and direct traffic spam as it happened.

For those that don't understand the benefit of this type of spam, what it does is trick webmasters who see this traffic in their analytics to visit the site. By doing this the unbeknownst webmaster may get his browser loaded with cookies from Amazon and other affiliate programs, the cookies can last up to 90 days and count towards affiliate sales if the webmaster goes shopping online later.

Links to other reports here and here.

Check out these screenshots from one of my new sites, it's of the same incidents described in the links provided above:

This image above shows that the referral and direct traffic spam happen at exactly the same time, it is obvious that there is only one culprit sending the traffic. Notice the referral source "free-social-buttons", this is the most common culprit doing this. Unfortunately there are going to be webmaster dumbasses that will put this share button on their websites and infecting their visitors too.

Fake direct traffic is mostly from the United States, looks very legit.

One last screenshot here summarizing things...

I don't know if this traffic is the same traffic I was getting in my Sedo parked page reports, but I can't see how it's not. I've also read that this traffic spam is flying under the radar ONLY for G analytics because other traffic tools are hip to this tactic. The purpose of this report is to let people know that there is a good possibility that this traffic is being reported in the parking reports of wherever you may be parked.

Thank you for reading.

 

[DomainVP]

Great post, people aren't aware of this enough and just base decisions on visitor counts.

I previously posted a remedy using .htaccess to fix these issues, but since then the spam has gotten smarter and it directly effects Google Analytics by pinging the user id. So even if you block the access, their spam gets through to your dashboard.

I found that out after wracking my head over why my .htaccess wasn't working.

So now I block it directly from analytics using the 'Filter', here is the snippet that I use:

darodar\.|semalt\.|buttons-for-website|blackhatworth|ilovevitaly|prodvigator|cenokos\.|ranksonic\.|adcash\.|simple-share-buttons\.|social-buttons\.|sitevaluation\.|semaltmedia\.|100dollars-seo\.

Use the exclude option, then paste this bit, and then make sure you set "All Website Data" in your Apply Filter to Views at the bottom.

You obviously have this under control, and know what you are doing, but I figured I would drop this info here for those possibly looking for a resolution.

Cheers!

 

[deflee79]

Good info man! Thanks for sharing!

 

[briguy]

Thanks for explaining this simple enough that I can understand.
Just quick question....this free "social button" site is it doing the spamming (by being downloaded) or is it being used by spammers ?
I am familiar with some of the ones that @DomainVP mentioned