Need to exclude referral spam from Analytics reports

It turns out that some unusual referral URLs in my Blog's Google Analytics reports a few weeks ago were not a one off anomaly by a sneaky spammer.  If I followed the referral URL I got forwarded on to Amazon with some affiliate details - so they'd get a kickback for any purchases I made.

Today I see over a hundred visits from the Russian city Samara, along with large numbers of referrals from domains that have nothing in common with the content of my blog.

I'm contemplating moving the blog to another platform so that I can have greater control over the behaviour for blocking dodgy referrers.  For the time being I will have to settle for adding some filters to the Google Analytics reports as these dodgy referrers come in - so far just blocking one city is sufficient.

I would have hoped that the spammer would realise that my blog does not publish a list of backlinks to sites that have linked to my posts, so there is no value in "visiting" from his dodgy sites.

Want to know your audience?

For a few years in my career I was responsible for setting up web log analysis software to generate reports for various clients so that they could see what sort of value for money they were getting from their websites - at least in terms of the number of visitors, their location (approximate), which pages they were going to, what search engine queries they had used to find the site, etc., etc.

Webtrends suited us for a number of years, but then had a change in pricing model as they targeted major websites, so I evaluated a few other products and came across Weblog Expert which had enough features to be practical as a replacement and was in the right price range for some of our external clients.

Now that I am posting some content on my own little blog that is hosted somewhere that (presumably) won't allow me access to raw log files, I have had to look into other options. Google Analytics seems to do a reasonable job of producing pretty graphs and lets me know that my audience level is about the same as might hear me thinking aloud, but not quite as large as might hear me singing in the shower - neither of which I do often.