Just when it looked like the spam referrals in your web site traffic reports was fading away, a new source appears — this time from China: Foxweber (a.k.a. KingDatas, a Beijing Company).
Google Analytics has long been a target for referral spam – someone leaving fake referral visits in website traffic reports to entice them to click through to see why they are getting traffic from that source. The problem with these fake referrals is that they don’t actually send good traffic; in some cases, they didn’t send any traffic at all (a.k.a. ‘ghost’ visits).
Read the Definitive Guide to Removing All Google Analytics Spam for a working solution
Google has done a good job of clamping down on these annoying sources, but there always seems to be someone trying to ‘game the system’ to get access to the millions of unsuspecting small website owners (that don’t know any better). Leave a referral or two, and they will click – they will come to your link, looking for a link back to their site. They will read the content, searching for some reason why and where you linked to THEIR website…and in the end leave baffled and disillusioned.
In of May 2017, foxweber.com joined the list of spam sources, promoting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services to get bulk traffic directed to your website. For a small fee, you can buy traffic by the day — they even show how their own site has climbed dramatically via Alexa rankings. What they don’t tell you is that the traffic consists of real people searching for why they got visits to THEIR website…they aren’t really interested in what you have to say or offer.
So how do they get that traffic? By leaving fake referrals in thousands of Google Analytics reports. Website owners click the referral link to investigate. Think of it as advertising without disclosure. Here’s an example of the visits from foxweber.com in one Google Analytics referral report.
That would be bad enough, but they are now selling that service, so unsuspecting web site owners searching for improved traffic pay them for assistance…and they do what they do. Day after day, we get the ‘pleasure’ of yet another referral source. The only good sign is that they seem to share a few common sources — primarily form China. By the way, this has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization — what they promote — it is basically just another form of [paid] advertising.
You can use this information to build your own referral spam filters for now, but lets collectively hope Google shuts down the whole business.
Their customer list (i.e. you may get spam referral entries from) seems to include:
- yellowstonevisitortours.com
- goodwriterssales.com
- oldfaithfultaxi.com
- tourcroatia.co.uk
- justkillingti.me
- yellowstonesafaritours.com
- spinnerco.ca