Thousands of websites around the world are being affected by ghost referrer spam in their Google Analytics reports. For most site owners, it starts with a big increase in your site hits. Hey, it must be a fantastic site and everyone loves me... Well, it may be, and I hope that's the case for you, but it's a good idea to check.

What at first looks like a hack, turns out to be just very annoying. It doesn't actually effect your site, but it does affect your analytics by polluting it with fake data. It can be blocked by using analytics filters. There is a fantastic report by Carlos at ohow.co, if you'd like to know more. I highly recommend you have a read, check all your analytics and apply the filters.

If you see pages on your analytics that you didn't make, such as guardlin....etc, then your data has been compromised.

PS: while the spam is relatively harmeless, the links it can send you to may not be....