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.

Twitter referrals in Google Analytics

Twitter has its own short url for tweets, which will show up in Google Analytics reports as referrer starting with http://t.co

To trace back to the tweet we can use Twitter's search with the url as the search term.

I recently tweeted a link to a blog post, and sure enough the subsequent day included a referrer from a URL below http://t.co

The search result can be seen from:

https://twitter.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FcqWPRVyJ9l

Chances are that this will stop working by the time you get around to reading this, as the search time range is rather limited (a few days?)