As part of the big website overhaul, I recently added Google analytics to the website. The reason I haven’t for so long is that, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t get any page views so why measure what’s not there. However, much to my surprises, over the two weeks I have got about 15 visitors. I know it’s not a lot but the interesting thing is where they are from. There were / are readers in The USA, Germany, China and Australia.
After looking into the data a bit more I came to the conclusion that I must all be spam. After a bit more digging I saw that many of the hits were coming from another domain unknow to me. Out of curiosity I tried to see what was on the domain only to be redirected to a hosting company’s website.
Referrer spam is a type of spam that some affiliates use to generate traffic to their affiliate links. They hope that you’ll see their domain in your Google Analytics and go to it. It’s really that simple.
It looks like someone had set up a bot to spam sites with links to try and make money. I was hoping people actually read this :(