Social-Buttons.Com Spams Google Analytics

Typically when you see traffic in Google Analytics, you can be sure that it is legitimate traffic to your website. However, there are a few known spammers out there that successfully spam Google Analytics tracking codes with bogus visits, hoping that the Analytics users visit the site that is supposedly “referring” traffic. One such domain that is being used for this is Social-Buttons.com.

I have just begun to see traffic in Google Analytics from Social-Buttons.com in the middle part of March 2015, and if you look at the Google Trends statistics for search terms of Social-Buttons.com, you can see that there is a spike in searches for Social-Buttons.com in March 2015 from a baseline of 0 searches prior to March 2015.

There is an excellent analysis of exactly who is behind this spam attack here, but it still proves to be an annoyance to webmasters seeking to measure traffic to their websites. If you want to rid yourself of these bogus visits, the solutions presented here work for now until the spammers out-innovate these protections.

Tags:

Related Posts

Jul 7, 2014
2 minutes

AddThis Can Cause Your Site To Not Load

Over the last few days, I have run across quite a few websites that seem to never finish loading. After waiting for 20 seconds or more, I give up, realizing that whatever content was on the site wasn’t worth it anymore for me to stare at a blank white browser until it loaded however much longer. Unfortunately for those websites, they are losing traffic that they will never get back.

#responsive-web-design #javascript #performance
Read More
Aug 21, 2014
4 minutes

Google Chrome Makes Web Developers Lazy

This post may make me sound ancient in the world of web development, but here it comes anyway.

Like Microsoft, Google has decided to implement functionality in their dominant browser that is incompatible with the other major competing browsers.

When I first started developing websites professionally, ensuring a website worked for 99% of the site’s visitors was easy, relatively, as you only needed to make sure the site worked in Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, there were a ton of random hacks and tricks required to deal with the quirks of this browser, but you were fairly safe knowing you had developed your site to be tailored to the browser of choice for your visitors. However, the dominance of Internet Explorer 6 was bound to come to an end and it ushered in an era of multiple popular browsers including Firefox and Chrome. With no single browser having a massive advantage in terms of users in all areas, web developers had to make sure that thorough testing of their sites was completed in each of the major browsers.

#jquery #javascript #rant
Read More
Jun 2, 2014
2 minutes

Defensive Development - Fail Fast or Go Home

Defensive Development is a programming practice that is frequently misunderstood, but is nevertheless a critical practice to follow when working in many environments. I have seen articles written that argue that defensive development simply causes nonsensical null checks to be written, and as a result of seeing people writing bad code defensively, argues that no one should practice defensive development. There are other articles that, like many things in software development, argue that you should always use defensive development for everything.

#magento #javascript #design-patterns
Read More