A Russian spammer known as Vitaly is using twitter.com referral traffic to promote himself.
If your Google Analytics account data is targeted by this spammer you will notice an unusual amount of referral traffic coming from Twitter and a page title called “Vitaly rules google.”
This type of ghost traffic can taint your Google Analytics data and make it hard to monitor your website’s real performance. For example, you may not be able to determine your site’s actual bounce rate unless you filter the ghost traffic out.
Spamming aimed at search engines involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL. When the spammer never visited the affected site, the fake visits are called ghost traffic.
“Vitaly rules google” can be a headache, but it will not harm your web site or affect its SEO ranking. The best way to combat it is to (A) be aware of it, and (B) set filters in Google Analytics to exclude it from your web traffic data. Contact Movéo if you need help doing this.
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