In the first 100 days of 2015, we have had an increase on our kesslerfreedman.com traffic of visits from Russia. How much? A staggering 6,260.00% increase over the first 100 days of 2014.
This isn’t good news for us. It’s not like we’re picking up clients in Russia. And it’s something we see in Google Analytics for many, many of our clients.
Some of these visitors come from Google, and that’s fine. But some of them come from domains such as
o-o-6-o-o.com
blackhatworth.com
hulfingtonpost.com
priceg.com
bestwebsitesawards.com
cenoval.ru
Those 6 domains account for the majority of the Russian traffic. It’s not necessarily hurting anything on our site, but it skews our statistics in Google Analytics, and because of that, I’m not a fan of the activity.
We recommend that you NEVER visit these sites – that’s why there are no live links there. Some of them are shopping sites, some will activate virus protection because they are suspicious sites. None really provide a link to us. It’s what is known as referral spam. It is of no real benefit to your web site, and makes it harder to get clean analysis. You should clean it from your counts, like we have now done. However, it is an ongoing process, as you will keep needing to do it as more spammers pop up in the future.
For some good information on cleaning up your analytics from spam referrals, see here and here.