In this case, the traffic wasn’t human. It was bots triggering Google Analytics and not even loading the website. This “referral spam” attack seems to have simultaneously affected many thousands of sites across the web, with all showing the same referral source, huge spikes in Google Analytics figures, but no actual increases in users to the websites.
If they were genuine visitors from Poland, that would be wonderful and I’d eagerly embrace the new surge interest from a new market, but alas these were not real visitors.
I remain surprised that Google wasn’t able to filter out this form of spam and although the incident has finished now, it’s curious that Google still hasn’t removed those fake numbers from reports of sites that were affected. Hopefully it won’t happen again at this scale.
