Starting a new job in SEO is great, and it's made even better when you look at your first client you are reporting for and you can let them know they have seen massive increases in their traffic!
I was happy to see these spikes and emailed Darren, our CEO, to let him know. I was unaware of just how big the spikes were in comparison to the previous months results.
Whilst looking at the analytics I decided to look into the network and saw two very strange ISPs named 'Eric Fleischman' and 'Ian Duggan'. Now either these two guys really liked the site or there were some seedy reasons to why we had so many hits from them. After a little more digging I noticed that the average time spent on their visits was 00:00:00 and it made it clear that this was spam. But what does spamming another person's website get for them, apart from messing with our client's analytics? Google had the answer!
By just putting these two names into Google it showed that a lot of websites in the past few months have been getting the same problems as well as another ISP called 21 Productions.
But what do they get from this?
Speculation is rife on the internet about what these people are doing and the conclusion is that it looks like referer spam. This is a very cheap and sneaky way of gaining free links to a website you want to advertise. You constantly spam the website with a fake referer URL that points to the site you wish to advertise. The way they get the free link is that some websites publicise their access logs and referer logs which in turn will have this fake referer embedded within and will link to them, thus creating a free link for the website.
How can you combat this?
The quick fix if you are looking to keep your analytics accurate is to create an exclude filter for the range of IPs that they use (you can find their IP by doing a 'whois', at the moment their IPs are also quite well publicised on the internet at the moment from people investigating this spam).
If you wish to totally ban them from visiting your site you will have to exclude them via your hosting. The best way to do this would be to contact your web hosting service and they can tell you how to do this.