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Not sure if this is within the realms of stackoverflow, but I have generated the UA code to drop in but not implemented it into the site. Yet I am already starting to receive 'visitors' to the site, which are 'referral'.

How is this happening? and moving forward how can I stop it from skewing my stats?

Tony Ray Tansley
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    Google "referral spam" - this has been much discussed over the last year or so after this became a huge problem for all GA accounts. Basically people autogenerate GA IDs and sent traffic there in the hopes that you follow the referring urls and generate a few ad views on the spamming page. Use filters in GA to get rid of this. Here a few discussions on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bgoogle-analytics%5D+referral+spam – Eike Pierstorff Jul 28 '15 at 10:13
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    I have seen and read that before in articles, but still don't get how it is filtering through to the analytics when the code hasn't been applied to the site? – Tony Ray Tansley Jul 28 '15 at 10:16
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    The endpoint to GA data collection is public. As long as a I have a valid account id I can send data to that account (via my own code, via CURL-requests, by typing the GA request into the browser or by using Googles measurement protocol). Basically spammers do not have to use your code, they can simply use their own. – Eike Pierstorff Jul 28 '15 at 10:37
  • possible duplicate of [How to Block Spam Referrers like darodar.com from Accessing Website?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27666318/how-to-block-spam-referrers-like-darodar-com-from-accessing-website) – nyuen Jul 28 '15 at 13:37
  • Not really as this was happening before the UA code was even on my site. The solutions to the problem may the same but your link doesn't discuss this being an issue when not even applied to a html file. – Tony Ray Tansley Jul 28 '15 at 14:07

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