Member Avatar for MktgRob

Not really certain if this is the proper forum for this but can anyone explain what URL Harvesting is? I am asking because while reviewing the google analytics/referring sites info for my company's website I saw referral traffic from a site called trafficfaker.com.
Any insight would be welcome. Thank you.

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Dani AI

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Note for — the session pattern you logged (many single-page hits, immediate exits, 0s duration) is exactly how referral/URL‑harvest spam shows up in analytics. There are two common flavors: crawler-based bots that actually visit your site, and “ghost” or measurement‑protocol hits that never touch your server and simply inject data into your GA property. (viget.com)

Practical first steps to protect your Analytics data (apply these in a test view first, keep one raw/unfiltered view unchanged): enable GA’s bot filtering; build an Include filter on Hostname that lists every valid host your property should see (example regex: yourdomain\.com|shop\.yourdomain\.com|translate\.googleusercontent\.com); add a Campaign Source (or Source) exclude filter for repeat spam domains; and create a “No‑spam” advanced segment to re‑view historic data without the fake hits. Filters only affect future data, so keep the raw view for audits. (ionos.com)

If the offender actually crawls your site (check server logs / access logs for real GETs from the suspect hostnames or IPs) block it at the webserver or edge: Apache .htaccess or Nginx rules, a WAF (Cloudflare / Sucuri), or a site plugin for WordPress will stop crawler spam before it hits Analytics. For purely ghost hits — which exploit GA’s Measurement Protocol to post fake sessions directly to Google — server blocks won’t help; those are handled with the hostname/include filters noted above. Example server rules below (replace spamdomain.com with the offender): (github.com)

# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spamdomain\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} another-spam\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
# Nginx (inside server block)
if ($http_referer ~* "spamdomain\.com") {
    return 403;
}

Final notes: do not click suspect referrer URLs (they can host malware or phishing). Keep your hostname filter up to date, monitor the Hostname report regularly, and consider using community blacklists (Matomo) or an automated spam‑filter tool if the list grows. If the spam persists, escalate to your host or add a WAF rule-set. (searchengineland.com)

Member Avatar for MktgRob

I did some more searching on this and discovered that this is similar to e-mail harvesting but instead of gathering e-mail addresses to spam, URL Harvesting uses a bot to crawl urls with similar keywords and created fake visits (on my corporate site each of the 14 visits in the last 10 days consisted of a single page visit with immeadiate exit and no time on the site). From what I read at , the creators and sellers of this crap, is that the benefits are two fold. First, the web manager sees the referral site in whatever analytics software they use and click on the link to investigate, thus generating a hit on the site that is harvesting. The second is that the harvested url is then presented as one that is referring traffic to the site doing the harvesting.

Having said all of that, I encourage those of you who are infinitely smarter than me to visit the site I listed above, read their crap and please post up here anyway that the bot in question might be stopped. As Daniweb rules might block out the site I listed above, search on Traffic Hacker to find the site.

Please note, I formerly did some work for DaniWeb a few years back and I am currently working for a private institutional investment firm. I do not work for the URL Harvesting company and I am only looking for a way to stop these pinheads from using my company's url to make themselves look better.

Thanks.

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