How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google Analytics
Note that the "k" is a Cyrillic "к" and the trick is to get analytics users to click referral spam:<p>> Referral (or ghost) spam wasn’t that innocent. Curious marketers and web analysts checked domains they supposedly got traffic from. Referrers got them transferred to trashy websites with ads, viruses or porn.<p>> ...[Vitaly] needed software to get his websites into people’s analytics reports. His words were “if only one out of 1000 people click the link to see who these referrers are, I’ll gain profit.”<p>I just installed Google Analytics on my site and saw these weird referrers, and my site is quite obscure. Seems like this could be a widespread problem.<p>There's also a fix in the article from Georgi Georgiev: <a href="http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-google-analytics-spam/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-...</a><p>> Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Admin -> Filters area. Add a new filter with the following settings. Make sure you have the “Edit” access at the “Account” level in Google Analytics. Remember that the filter will eliminate traffic hits where the language dimension contains 15 or more symbols.<p>> Filter Pattern is .{15,}|\s[^\s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/.