Every time you visit a Web page with a browser, your browser sends the Web site the name of the previous Web page that you visited. SEOs often check rankings for Web sites and then click through the SERPs to their own Web sites (or client Web sites). That distorts the stats because it’s not a natural click.
You can disable sending referrers in Firefox with this method:
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vBulletin makes good forum software, but it’s hard to add Google Analytics to it. Most of the instructions that you find online on how to add the Google Analytics code don’t work for the forum archives.
UPDATE: I recommend just installing vbSEO instead of the solution below because you can add Google Analytics directly through the vbSEO interface. vbSEO also adds many other critical SEO improvements to the basic vBulletin installation. However, the solution below can still be used to add other types of tracking code to vBulletin, like Clicky Stats, and excellent free Web 2.0 stats program.
Here are some step-by-step instructions for adding Google Analytics (or other tracking code, like Clicky) to vBulletin:
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Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of strange one-word referrers from MSN Live Search in my logs. Today I saw a post by BitWorm that reveals this as referrer spam-like behavior from Microsoft.
The hits come from IP addresses beginning with 65.55.165.* and the referrer strings have this format:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=firefox&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP
The keyword (highlighted above) is always one word, and usually appears on the Web site somewhere, with the exception of the porn related keywords.
MSNdude posted a comment on the Webmaster World thread about this issue:
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This post is in response to Graywolf’s post about Google Analytics and bot tracking.
Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based analytics programs cannot capture data about robot activity on a site. But there is an easy way to get data about crawler activity on a site by grepping (searching) raw log files and analysing the data in a spreadsheet.
I had installed CrazyEgg’s tracking script on a site and forgotten about it. Tonight I was looking at the source code of the home page and noticed a script that was loaded from http://cetrk.com/.
I couldn’t remember what the script was so I typed cetrk.com into Google and couldn’t find any useful information. I eventually remembered that it was a CrazyEgg tracker and I decided to post about it so that other people could find information about it.
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