We’re a week into the site, and the Vote Trump analytics spam continues to persist (click here for last week’s article). However, it’s fortunately not nearly as persistent.  Ironically, the spam seemed to have reveal itself… on purpose.

I was shocked to see one of my referrals happened to be Vice.com’s Motherboard.  I was estatic!  Check the screenshot:

Six visitors? Man, they surely must have mentioned me!

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Unfortunately, that would not be the case.  The referral links to this article regarding Motherboard’s story on the prolific Google Analytics spam.  Being Motherboard, they delved straight to the source  to discover the spam was caused by a single person.  That person’s name? A man named Vitaly Popov, a Russian.

Popov is a spammer who has become especially crafty at spamming Google’s analytics.  One reason is for fame, another for traffic.  But the third reason is revenge for Google banning his Adsense account.  And yes, he does very much like Trump.

But the question remains on why vice linked to me.  Searching the article’s source code, we could find no link to wamzlee.com.  Devastated that they removed the link, the reason became quite clear why it couldn’t be found.

Shortly after posting, Motherboard updated their article to say this:

Editor’s note: A link to this article has been included in a wave of Google Analytics spam. Although it may appear that traffic is coming from Motherboard to your site, that is not the case.

Another clever analytics spam trick.  Well played,Vitaly Popov, well played.