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working of development of one site. i protected it with .htaccess file, so it is not accessible without knowing username and password. only few of us have access to it.

but, using Google Analytics, i noticed that i had some visitors from brazil (source is from bit.ly/forexmarket, aluguel-de-computadores.golbnet.com) and japan (source is from home-broker.golbnet.com).

can you help me, and give me ideas who are those and why there are tracked?

thank you in advance!

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 25 '11 at 10:43

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

closed as off topic by jscott, ThatGraemeGuy, Sam, Zoredache, sysadmin1138 Jan 26 '11 at 2:56


This could be a very unorthodox spamming technique. Someone could have very, very easily setup a script to record traffic hits to thousands of different analytics accounts, and drive people to those pages. –  Yahel Jan 20 '11 at 16:19

7 Answers 7

Please read http://techhacking.com/2011/01/23/google-analytics-referrer-spammers/ - explains why it happens and how to stop further referrer spam.

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The only way GA could have recorded a hit was for the javascript code on the page to trigger. .htaccess will not send page content until the correct user/pw is given. The only explanation is that you have either not set at all or not properly setup .htaccess on one or more of your pages/directories.

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i think .htaccess is properly installed and properly set. could it be that some of plugins installed in browser are cause of those results? –  user48058 Jan 16 '11 at 16:08
No. Even if a plugin were to purposefully grab your GA code and then run it again (which is highly unlikely because...well there's just no reason why anybody would ever do that), it would still be done through your browser and have the same IP as you. –  Crayon Violent Jan 16 '11 at 22:24
And even the plugin were to take the urls and send it elsewhere, that "elsewhere" would still have to get through your .htaccess in order for your page to load and GA code to trigger. –  Crayon Violent Jan 16 '11 at 22:27
Another possibility is that someone who does have your user/pw for .htaccess went through a proxy of some kind. –  Crayon Violent Jan 16 '11 at 22:28
just a question...did you look at other reports besides the visitor reports? Did you dig deeper and see what pages they actually accessed, what urls were reported? –  Crayon Violent Jan 16 '11 at 22:29

I created my Google Analytics account in December, but I just today installed the tracking code on my Wordpress blog for the first time.

I went to the Reports area in Google Analytics minutes after installing the code, and found one visit from Brazil, with the bit.ly/forexmarket source, on January 5. Pretty inexplicable, since the tracking code wasn't even in place yet.

I was trying to figure out what the traffic was, and found this post. So, user198003, I just wanted to let you know that you're not the only one seeing that weird result.

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I really think it's spam. The bit.ly link resolves to something which probably is an affiliate link for some forex software at plus500.com which has it's own affiliate offer at 500affiliates.com. See the bit.ly statistics link: http://bit.ly/forexmarket+ for details. Seems like it got quite a few hits since December 31, including me of course ;) Interesting way of spamming really. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam) the actual target is an open log and thus better search engine rankings but I think in this case it's actually us looking at our own logs.

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For what it is worth - we have the same on our site (I deployed it on the weekend/ yesterday ) and I just check today to see if it was registering on analytics today and also found two his from "referal site" - bit.ly/forexmarket

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EI USER user198003 dONT be worried, that is totally a bug of analitics, is a fake visit record. Your htaccess is fully correct. U can see in my link what is that referal http://3plej-life.blogspot.com/2011/01/spam-bitlyforexmarket-anyshitgolbnetcom.html We are researching how they do this, because this is reported in more tha 3 millions websites, the problem is in analtcs not in your website, soo please feel free about continue your proyect without problems.

you can go to my website blog and read more information about what is that NEW technique, this technique have more than 2 years... is very oodd

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They're probably sequentially enumerating GA accounts and pinging them with links - unless your server logs say otherwise, there is no reason to assume they reached your site.

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