Google Analytics Referral Spam

I noticed today in my Google Analytics report that I had quite a spike of traffic in the last few days. “Huh, that’s odd!” The source seemed to be mainly referrals, so I dug in to see where it’s from. Hm. These don’t look like legit referrers, do they?

Google Analytics spam

So yeah, it looks like this is a thing now. Rather than setting up an exclude filter (as detailed in that link), I instead used the “valid hostname filter” technique from the Definitive Guide to Removing Referral Spam. Let’s see if that does the trick…


Important Note

This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.