Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by newman314 on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @02:16AM
(#13261754)
Couple more links that I have found useful.
* https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your...
* https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-...
* http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-t...
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by soared on Monday December 26, 2016 @07:26PM
(#13260516)
Any guesses on the value of the "google.com" with the Cyrillic G? I'd say $1MM.
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by notatoad on Monday December 26, 2016 @08:36PM
(#13260738)
i thought that when icann allowed non-latin characters in URLs, they were going to limit it to only the ccTLD where those characters were in common usage - so ԍooԍle.ru would be valid, but ԍooԍle.com wouldn't be registerable.
am i misremembering, or did that plan change? this just seems like a phishing nightmare.
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by 086421357909764 on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @12:43PM
(#13264595)
I actually just ran a query on a domain using Google Domains and was offered a .com variant of an existing domain with the only difference, the letter c with a Hacek (Ĉ). Phishing nightmare indeed.
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by mutatio on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @03:30AM
(#13261981)
Probably < $0. It's a deceptive domain of a strongly contested trademark - all the Unicode variants are probably just burner domains.
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by DenisM on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @01:43AM
(#13261667)
There's also Cyrillic o / о and e / е. And l can be substituted for the capital I or the digit 1. We're looking at quite a few different fake "google" domains. I doubt any of them will be worth a million bucks, they are not that scarce unless someone registeres all of them at once to squeeze the market.
Re:How Referral Spam Like lifehacker.com Gets into Google An...
by csydas on Tuesday December 27, 2016 @10:08AM
(#13263507)
Probably not much cause it'd look like гоогle.com or something else silly. The Cyrillic g character would stand out and most Russians would go to yandex before Google so accidental Russian traffic would be barely worth the effort. The print form of cyrillic that would be used in browsers just doesn't have a character to make the domain worth anything.
The vowels on the other hand look the same. ОO, eе, аa.
> Referral (or ghost) spam wasn’t that innocent. Curious marketers and web analysts checked domains they supposedly got traffic from. Referrers got them transferred to trashy websites with ads, viruses or porn.
> ...[Vitaly] needed software to get his websites into people’s analytics reports. His words were “if only one out of 1000 people click the link to see who these referrers are, I’ll gain profit.”
I just installed Google Analytics on my site and saw these weird referrers, and my site is quite obscure. Seems like this could be a widespread problem.
There's also a fix in the article from Georgi Georgiev: http://blog.analytics-toolkit.com/2016/language-spam-latest-...
> Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Admin -> Filters area. Add a new filter with the following settings. Make sure you have the “Edit” access at the “Account” level in Google Analytics. Remember that the filter will eliminate traffic hits where the language dimension contains 15 or more symbols.
> Filter Pattern is .{15,}|\s[^\s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/.