Probably most or all of you, in recent months, happened to catch a glimpse inside the Google Analytics report “Acquisition> Referral” and discover visits coming from sites somewhat suspicious, such as darodar (dot) com, button-for-website (dot ) com, and so on.

To permanently delete them from the reports, you could use two different techniques:

• elimination via .htaccess
• changing the Google Analytics web-property (it seems that these spam referrals attack the property with final -1)

These techniques, therefore, work when the site exist… but.. if it does not exist?

CASE: Visits from Spam Referrers on site that not exist

In March, I had to create a new Google Analytics account to show the admin panel during a training session. The account takes the name of www.hotelpincopallino.com, a site / hotel that does not exist and the web property returned is this:

As you can see the web property ends with -1 and it is not integrated in any web site: it was created for a demonstration purposes only!

A few weeks later I decided to “clean up” the account but I faced with a fact quite bizarre: the code used as an example records visits!

Overview

GeoLocation

Referrer

Networks

Once this information displayed my question, which is still unanswered, is this: how did a referrar spam to trace a web property that exists but that it is not “printed” in any web page? is it possible that there is a “micro bug” within the systems of Google Analytics?

What do you think? What is your opinion about that?

Link to the italian post: www.enricopavan.com/referrer-spam-e-google-analytics