Ghost Spam - How Dangerous is it?
author: Lee Buttolph
Sample Ghost Spam from Google Analytics
What the hell is Ghost Spam? It is cancer on your website analytics.
There are organizations out there that send fake referral traffic to your site. It looks and feels like someone actually came to your website and viewed your content but in actuality, they never did.
Why would these companies do this? Most likely in the hopes that you will visit their site to find out why this company is doing such great work to drive traffic to you. It is a scam. Not the kind of someone from Nigeria trying to steal money but of the search engine optimization (SEO) kind.
Why do you need to combat it? Imagine if you owned a manufacturing company and you made widgets. And a couple times a day, someone walked onto your factory floor and upped the counter on how many widgets you made by 10-100. Oh, and as soon as you instruct security to not allow this man in, a totally different person starts the practice all over again.
How could you run your factory this way if you had no way to know how many real widgets you made every day/week/month/year? All financial models would be useless. This is exactly what the ghost spammers are doing. They are messing with your website analytics.
The only way to combat this is to stay vigilant. Check out this tutorial on how to get rid of Ghost Spam. You will need to check your website weekly to clean out any new ghost spammers that pop up.