In the last few months I been plagued by ghost referrers and haunting my clients analytics. While these ghosts are not viruses or spam they are sucking up my time and making my life more complicated. I especially don’t like spending my time on problems caused by people who don’t want a real job. While I love what I do, not everyone runs an ethical business. That being said…
I’m no expert (that’s putting it mildly), but I’ve been put in a position where I have had to know at least something about what is going on. While inflated web statistics is nothing new in our industry, a particularly annoying little twist has taken over our analytics. It goes something like this. You get contacted by “I can double your web traffic, all you have to do is pay me for each new visitor.” This sound great of course, who wouldn’t want to double or triple there web traffic? And you only have to pay them if your numbers go up. Sounds to good to be true? Well it probably is. While there are legitimate business that fine tune and drive business to your site, there are also plenty of frauds and they are clever. Many have now created a way to hijack a web sites Google Tracking Code and use it to “look” like you have new visitors. A particularly nasty little organization comes out of Russia that goes by the name “darodar.”
About two months ago I started get a lot of referrals on my clients sites from darodar.com. The referrer then created a page called “co.lomb” or “not-set” in my clients most visited pages section. This is how my research started. Who is darodar and what is this page? It turns out that darodar steals that tracking code used to collect accurate data from your site. Using that code they generate a “non-page” referral. So while it looks like you had traffic it’s really just smoke. Or in this case, ghosts. Other common ghosts include anything with the word “buttons” in it, social-buttons or website-buttons and the not so cleverly named hulfingtonpost.
This of course means that I have to go in and get rid of all that false data. And while some spam and referral blocking tools help, the blockers are not keeping up with the ghosts and they are spreading like zombies. This extra effort means that my clients are getting accurate data, but the freight is being picked up by me.
A word of caution, if you are thinking about hiring a firm to help you with your site traffic, please be careful and thoughtful about it. The best way to increase your traffic is still what is has always been. Have your site address on all of your paperwork, advertise, use social media and provide a great service or product. Word of mouth referrals are still the best way to get noticed.
Remember, ghosts aren’t good for business.
