Analytics Spam: What Do You Think?
Before to starting with what analytics spam is, I tell you exactly what I did to install javascript code and what Google analytics does.
Google analytics is one of the best, if not “the best” reliable tool that give you a lot of information to know about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. It is an invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed reporting analytics.
Image credit: Zero g
To install Google Analytics, all you need to do is place a small piece of code on each page of your site that you want to track. The best for myself and other web publisher is that the service is totally free.
Here, a good step-by-step instruction on how to install Google Analytics:
- To install Google Analytics for your website, all you need to do is sign up for a free account at http://analytics.google.com
- Follow the steps provided by Google for creating a profile for your domain.
- Once these steps are completed, Google Analytics will provide you with some HTML code that you are required to copy to your index.html/php.
- To add the HTML code on your website use an FTP client such as Filezilla, or your site File Manager, and put it on your index.html/php file.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the file where you see the following tag: *</body>
- Right before the </body> tag, paste the lines of HTML code provided by Statcounter. Save the changes.
- To access your stats, log in to your Analytics account at http://analytics.google.com.
So, what do we mean exactly by ‘tracked’? Well, each time a visitor comes to your site, Google Analitics is able to give a range of information from the to analyzing the performance of your sites.
- Setting Goals
- Comparing Date Ranges
- Deep Geographic Data
- Local Conversion Data
- Funnel Visualization
- Navigation Summary
- Complete AdWords Integration
- Site Overlay
- Let’s Bounce
- Keyword Source
- Referring Sites
- Browser Capabilities
- Search Engine Traffic
Do you know that the information that Google Analytics picks up about a visitor can be faked?
But, can we be one hundred percent certain that robot index website are not used for other purposes. A robot index website is a computer program that check link popularity on website. A file like “robots.txt” is used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites(for example: mydomain.com/robots.txt ).
I wonder if it is possible to build robots that index websites which do execute javascript. This is a great question, I’d love to get answer about this.
An Example Of Webite For Spam Prevention
I did a question because I was browsing SEOMOZ today when I read an interesting article posted by Tom C, where he talk about inflating traffic on Google Analitics through a robot index website. I’m agree with TomC when say that it’s possible to build an executive javascript that visit people’s sites.
If done well, the fake traffic would be hard to detect, but in reality most spammers will be lazy and won’t randomise their traffic enough, so if you look closely it’ll stand out.
What is the advantage? Well, there are two of advantages.
- Inflating natural traffic to your site in order to increase popularity
- Increasing link back and generate indexable pages with increasing page rank.
You might be skeptical about this, so check out this case study of a fake website in action on his personal blog: The site in question is: http://iamready4u.synthasite.com/
You’ll notice it has auto-generated content and what look like an auto-generated link to my site. I have a hard time believing that this is genuine traffic (though I’m not 100% sure either way - which is what makes the whole prospect even more troubling)
Conclusion
Which are the future of Web Spam? I do not know if will be the next phase of spam? Personally I doubt Google taking preventative measures to eliminate spam, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this will be a issue in the next months.
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