For a couple of months I’ve seen chatter about spam sites showing up in Google Analytics’ Site Content reports, but hadn’t seen it affect any of our sites – until yesterday. We had a curious spike in traffic on May 11, and noticed the following in the “All Pages” report:
Obviously these are not pages on our website, but these spammers have spoofed our GA code, copying it onto their website. Your website hasn’t been hacked, it’s just tricky spam. As always, it can be omitted from reporting by creating and applying a filter to one of your Account Views.
Then, when unsuspecting visitors like us visit these links – which often direct to spam or porn sites – they collect “free” traffic. Definitely don’t click on them!
How To Eliminate Page Spamming in Google Analytics
Use Google Tag Manager! I’m not 100% sure that it would be entirely effective, but if you set up and install Google Tag Manager (GTM) to house your Google Analytics tracking, it would be much harder for a spammer to spoof your GA code.