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Spamish referrer links in stats

A topic by Racso created Jan 01, 2018 Views: 1,641 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Note: I thought I had published this before, but it seems that I didn't save it. Sorry if it gets posted twice.

I'm noticing some really weird links in the referrers of one of my games. They seem like spam links to me:

Perhaps Itch.io could simply ignore the links that come from those domains?

Moderator

I think Yandex is a popular search engine and/or portal in Russia. We must have a filter for referral spam already, otherwise we'd be seeing a lot more, and more obvious, spam links.

Admin(+3)

I don't think we should hide the links, but maybe we can group them together? So you can see how much traffic you're getting from yandex?

Thanks for the clarification.

@leafo That would be useful, indeed. The downside is that we would lose the search keywords. I don't find them very useful right now because I don't understand them (so, in my specific case, I agree with grouping these links), but some people may be able to read them. How's Google being handled?

Admin (2 edits) (+1)

I agree that you will lose keywords which could be useful information. Google uses a redirect with javascript to hide their referrer data so websites can't tell what queries were used. They will just appear as 'https://google.com'

Oh, too bad. With that in mind, my opinion is to group them, then. I believe that Google drives the most traffic for most people, so keeping Yandex with that level of detail won't be that effective (specially since a lot of people won't even understand the search terms).

Of course, the ideal scenario would be to have some way to group or separate the links with a button or something, but that's probably too much work.

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