Weird visitors to my site
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Hi,
I am in the process of disentangling myself from a dodgy SEO company. At some point they set up another GA account on my site without consulting me. I replaced the tracking code with my original account on my wordpress site, placing the tracking code on the dashboard. There is a box in the dashboard for you to do this.
For some reason the account he created is still giving me analytics but from mostly one url :forum.topic55622342.darodar.com. It has marked it as a referral?
When you click it it redirects to this site : http://activities.aliexpress.com/computers_channel.php?aff_platform=aaf&sk=vV3B2RJYB%3A&cpt=1421321021096&null
There have been 218 visits from this "referral" in the last month and also 2 direct visits to a clients online gallery (i'm a photographer).
I am guessing the code for this new account is still on the site somewhere?
Funnily enough in the first month I was getting targeted by spam using my contact form and I was a bit perplexed as to why. We had to put captchas on the contact forms which I was loathe to do as its another step for a client to have to go through causing resistance. Has this link got something to do with it? I have recently disavowed a lot of toxic links he created, so maybe they had something to do with it?
Best wishes.
David.
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Hi Richard,
I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question.
I have use the referral exclusion to stop the erroneous analytics data.
Although I am using XYZ contact form and I am not too sure if they have a honeypot plug in, I am just waiting for the customer service to get back to me. I will go to contact form 7 if XYZ do not have the facility.
Thanks again!
Best wishes.
David.
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darodar.com is a typical spam referral that shows up in most accounts. Other common ones are 7makemoneyonline, semalt, and buttons-for-websites. There are a few options for filtering them that we wrote about here: http://www.theedesign.com/blog/2015/blocking-spam-referral-traffic-google-analytics
The best option is typically Filters in Google Analytics, but we've run into accounts that don't have proper permissions to use the filters.
For the contact form, you should look into a honeypot field instead of captcha. Captcha can be easily broken by most bots and lowers the conversion rates of users. A honeypot field is a field that is hidden from users with css, but bots will see the field and fill it out. When they do, the form will not be submitted to you.
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