Every morning I have a ritual of checking analytics data with my first coffee. That's a nice little, usually relaxing, ritual. Then about two weeks ago I noticed something weird.
I started getting search traffic for term 'bioenergoterapia'.
The weird thing is of course, I never wrote about this topic or anything remotely similar on my site. And still, this keyword seemed to be sending consistently around 10 searches every day.
If you do a Google search for "bioenergoterapia" you won't see my site anywhere, and even if you type "bioenergoterapia prelovac" you will get zero results.
So how come I am getting 10 visitors a day from Google then?
My first idea was I got hacked and someone injected malicious code so I checked but this time everything was clear.
I then checked the origin of users from Analytics, and I could see that Google is sending them from Poland. I did another search this time on google.pl but again my site was nowhere to be found.
What if... ?
So, what if someone was using my Google Analytics code on their site? I thought this was impossible because when you register a site for Google Analytics you need to type the site URL and surely this protects your code.
I made a search on google.pl again found a site called psychoenergoterapia.pl. The site is using my theme, nothing wrong with that, but for some unknown reason they also decided to copy and paste the contents of my site footer, including the Google Analytics code.
And clearly it was working just fine in this alien environment.
And what IF...?
While this case is benign in nature and gave me something to play with every morning, there might be cases when this can go even beyond a practical joke (do that to your friend who just opened a site ...).
The case basically proves that it is possible to dramatically skew somebodies analytics data and potentially make huge damage to them. Who are them? Companies paying a lot of money for adwords and conversion campaigns for example...
Now, psychoergoterapia.pl, will you please remove my code from your footer? Thanks.
Continue reading:
- Google tech support on Analytics account removal
- Check your website for virus attack !
- How to Add Google Custom Search to your Blog
Posted in: SEO
TAGS:analytics problems 2009, analytics tagging working, analytics tracking code stolen, google analytic probleem, google analytics, google analytics code working, google analytics malicious tag, google analytics origin, google analytics problem, google analytics problems, google analytics problems 2009, google sites footer, google sites footer removal, google webmaster poland, problem analytics, problems google analytics
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
10 Comments
Hi!
I encountered a strange thing on my website.
When I browse my site this morning, there's a semi-transparent white layer floating on my page. the height of the layer is about 800 pixels.
I can still see my page thru' the layer, but I cannot click any hyperlink on the portion of my page which is beneath the layer.
Finally I found out that the layer are "produced" by google analytics. I commented-out the google analytic script on my page, and all are normal now.
I wonder whether anyone else got this also.
What's the problem with the google analytics? Anyone can give me idea?
Thanks.
I am having this problem too. The site hasn't stolen any of my code but they are using the same GA code. I didn't think it was possible but there must be some kind of bug in Google Analytics.
I finally found a lead for the reason Google sent me a nasty email about removing my site from their index. The state "We detected cloaking on your site and suspect this is the cause." As mentioned here *none* of the words are listed in my site. Thanks for blogging about this and give me a lead.
hi
sounds like this one from Australia (not Austria)
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1124702
D
It is quite amusing :)
There is no better thing than sipping hot coffee in the morning and browsing through you visitors log... :)
even here in Poland we've got some strange cases like this one : ) perhaps they don't realy know a lot about analytics and wordpress or so but they wanted to have own website so they decided to take your theme with all You've got in footer.
But it's strange that Analytics count their stats into Your account even if they have Your code on their website. I remember my similar case when I had the same GA code in polish site and american one and it counted stats only for the polish site (polish website was the oryginal to which code was assigned) and american traffic wasn't shown in my Analytics. I thought that code is assigned only to one site and it count traffic only from it even if you put code into antoher website it shouldn't count it.
Once I found the problem, yes I can find ways around it. My concern is that someone might be doing this on purpose.
Hi Vladimir,
This is a (potential) common problem to all tagging-based web analytics tools. However, in my experience it very rarely happens.
I used to work for two web tracking companies and I can only remember one case of "stolen content".
You would think that someone "stealing" elements of your site would be wise enough to remove the tracking code. But I guess in this case they are not very technical so probably didn't know what they are doing.
As suggested by Rarst you should be able to filter it out.
Cheers,
Michael
I am not sure but I think it would be possible to construct filter in GA that will limit results to traffic on specific URL. Needs testing.