StumbleUpon sending fake traffic to fake pages

by Patrick Altoft on November 6, 2007

Update: I checked my logs a bit better and it seems these guys are using my GA code. Lets hope they figure it out before management asks where the traffic went.

StumbleUpon is sending hundreds of visitors to pages on my site that don’t exist. Pages like /limousines-cute.php, /Unique-limo.html and /stumbleviral4.php

The site hasn’t been hacked and the pages give 404 errors so Google Analytics doesn’t even get loaded up so I don’t understand how it can be measuring traffic let alone getting any traffic.

My only idea is that somebody is using my Google Analytics code on their site.

Anybody else seeing this?

StumbleUpon fake traffic

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

Jeremy Luebke 06 Nov 2007 at 12:15 pm

Haven’t seen it, but scrapers is a possibility.

So is someone doing referrer spam on your site and using SU as the source in whatever program they are using. I would think those would go to the homepage though.

Glen Allsopp 06 Nov 2007 at 12:56 pm

Stumble Viral 4 seems like it was a test for something

Pretty interesting

Caroline Middlebrook 06 Nov 2007 at 4:18 pm

How bizarre. I just had a look at my stats and I didn’t notice anything unusual at first until I scrolled through lower down. I am getting a few results to things like

/blog/page4/

which doesn’t exist. There’s only 1or 2 hits showing though so I wonder if that’s just me clicking around as I write pages on the site?

Luiz 07 Nov 2007 at 12:12 pm

This is unfortunately true. Once my site (portal de noticias in portuguese) was atacked too. I don’t understand why these guys do this! What they receive for these things?

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