Referral Traffic From Unknown Site

[leaseman]

For the past month we have been getting referral traffic (reflected in Google Analytics) from a site we don't recognize. We don't see our link anywhere on the site so how can we be getting referral traffic from it. This is an issue because it's throwing off our analytics. Any ideas for this novice?

[edited by: mademetop at 9:39 am (utc) on Nov 6, 2013]
[edit reason] No links or URLs please as per TOCs [/edit]

[lucy24]

Referer spam? Consistent IPs or do they vary all over the map?

Immediate and predictable idea:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} garbagesite\.com
RewriteRule (/|\.html)$ - [F]

replacing ".html" with any extensions you actually use for pages. Or, of course, equivalent in IIS. But in the long term you'll find that referer blocks seldom deploy, because they all turn out to come from the same Ukrainian robots. And you've already blocked those.

That's assuming the offending site is some hopelessly spammy, probably hacked garbage. Now, if anyone can figure out why a Lithuanian daycare center* would link to me...


* Or possibly a Latvian nursery school. I forget. Perplexing, anyway. Past experience with hotlinkers suggests that some people with small but legitimate sites let their nephews piggyback on the domain name, with dire consequences.