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:
comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts

When Is Enough CSS Enough?

One of the major pushes in web development today is to try to do as much of the styling of a website as is possible from within the CSS of the site. The idea behind this is that when you do so, you remove styling responsibilities from your JavaScript and HTML content, resulting in a much better separation of concerns. The other aspect of this is that CSS styling is typically handled in a more native fashion in the browser as compared to what you can accomplish via Javascript.

Read More

JavaScript Can Have An Interesting Interpretation of Order

There is an interesting little quirk with the way in which JavaScript decides which function it should execute next. You see, while the JavaScript engine has a single thread of execution, it creates the illusion of multiple simultaneous processes running at once by utilizing a queue of functions to execute. This means that every time you make a call to a function in your JavaScript, there is no absolute guarantee that it will be the next piece of code run, as there may have been other events triggered that beat your custom function onto the execution queue.

Read More

PHP serialize/unserialize is faster than json_encode/json_decode

One of the things that I tend to focus on with a website is how quickly everything loads and executes. However, that focus can sometimes get to be a bit too narrow, only considering the performance of those resources that are required for the initial page load, and not for other dynamic aspects of the site. We recently implemented New Relic on one site, and gained much insight into how long each aspect of our site took to load, and how long each of the most popular requests took to execute.

Read More