Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
-
Hi,
We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc.
The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them.
As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent.
The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is
1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it).
2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors).
Many thanks in advance
-
You might be better with a server side tracker like http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
The answer from Mat probably has the best logic, but the only problem is are you legally responsible for mitigating the possibility of fraud?
I would make sure you add this to the contract, as I am not sure you are going to be able to defeat a proxy or spoofer, just in case the referrer gets smart and decides to work the system.
An anti fraud system can be put into place, but LOL I am not sure you will have the access to the multi million dollar fraud monitoring tools that Google does, that are contstantly updated and algorithmically and systematically monitor as well as have auditors who manually do random checks...
-
Hi - Well we are really just acting on behalf of the client - that's what they want.
Also its only visitors from that specific website (very close niche) - not just any site
-
Google Analytics doesn't report IP Address though - which is another reason to take a different root. Not knocking GA, I love it. However it isn't the right tools for this.
I suspect that the fiverr gigs use ping or something the create the mass of "unique visits". Very easy to spot. Unless you have some fairly sophisticated tools to hand i'd imagine that any method that can deliver 5000 for $5 is going to be pretty easy to spot.
Might try it now though. I love fiverr for testing stuff
-
If you must use Analytics, I would drill down to the source of referral within analytics. This will give you the URL, page, or whatever. I think you can also drill down to the referring IP etc...
You need to log were they come from through them. Export your results every month and see a pattern.
If you get 500 referrals from website B's IP or URL, then its a sure way of knowing they are throwing people at you.
But Mats answer is best, will give you times, not just dates and will also give you more detailed info.
-
My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0
Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?
-
Google Analytics isn't designed to pull the data in the way you really want to for something like this. It can be done I suppose, but it'd be hard work.
There are only so many metrics you can measure, and all are pretty easy to fake. However having the data is an easy to access form means that you can spot patterns and behaviour, which are much harder to fake.
Probably a starting point would be to measure distribution of the various metrics on the referred traffic v the general trend. If one particular C class block (or user agent, or resolution, or operating system, or whatever) appeared at a different frequency in the paid traffic that would be a good place to look deeper.
Thinking less technically for a moment though, I bet you could just implement one of the many anti click fraud systems to do most of this for you. same idea, but someone else has already done the coding. Googling for click fraud brings up a stack of ads (tempting to click them loads and set off their alarms!!).
-
Hi Mat,
A very informative answer.
If someone is going to try and spoof analytics, then would they not also be able to equally try and fool the script?
If someone was to try this do you know how they would likely try and do it - essentially if I know what is likely to be tried, then I can work out something that could counteract it. Are there certain things that can't be fooled, or are very difficult to fool ? - EG things like browser resolution, location etc - or are this just as easy to spoof as anything else?
many thanks
-
It isn't hard to fake this at all I am afraid. Spotting it will depend on how sophisticated the person doing it is.
My personal preference would be not to use analytics as the means of counting it. Doing that you are going to be slightly limited in the metrics you have available and will always be "correcting" data and looking for problems rather than measuring more correctly and having problems spotted.
I'd have a script on page that logs that checks for a referrer and it if matches the pattern for website B creates a log record instead.
You then have the ability to set your rules. For instance if you get 2 referrals from the same IP a second apart would you count them? What about 10 per hour 24 hours a day? You can also log the exact timestamp with whatever variables you want to collect, so each click from the referring site might be recorded as:
- Time stamp
- Exact referring URL
- User agent
- IP
- Last visit (based on cookie)
- Total visits (based on cookie)
- #pages viewed (updating cookie on subsequent page views )
- and so on
Analytics doesn't give you access to the data in quite the same way. I'd definitely want to be logging it myself if the money involved is reasonable.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using the same image across the site?
Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1