My company (Viscus Infotech) has grown insanely popular and everyone and their dog seem to be copy pasting stuff that we’ve either produced or have designed.

First, it was a local company that changed the RGB color values and rest everything was a rip-off. See screenshot below.

Now, it is a Chinese website by the name Wallsoo that copied the content layout, navigation, color combination and even the images. The website is a rip off of the Viscus website and already has a PR of 2. Thanks to some unique backlinks.

Now this post isn’t really about how popular my company is or to single out someone who has copy pasted my design, but it is to identify what analytics is meant for, analysis and acting upon that information.

By now you might have understood that I got to know about this rip-off from Google Analytics; well the title itself says so. Let us dig a bit deep into what the Hostnames tab means in Analytics.

Hostnames corresponds to all the hosts that have your Google Analytics code on them. This means that if you have sub-domains or if pages that have canonical issues or test servers, all these domains will correspond to hostnames. Now, going to Visitors >> Network Properties >> Hostnames will tell you this. This will help you understand if the data that is presented to you by analytics is purely traffic that flows to your website or data that is reported from other hosts as well. But there is more to it, let me try to explain.

How many times have you seen that a site is sending referral traffic to your website but actually the link never exists? It has happened with many webmasters and SEOs who may have either been unable to decipher it or haven’t even given a damn about it. Rip offs such as the one that I mentioned above, usually has analytics code (JS based tracking) untouched. This is where you can know which all websites have put your analytics on, and how much traffic is to them as compared to you.

Now, of course you can handle the rip-offs but it definitely skews the data and represents inflated figures in terms of visitors/visits and pageviews. In fact, it distorts every metric in your analytics interface. A way to prevent it is to set hostnames based filters in your profiles. Under Analytics settings, you need to look for filters and then add a new “Custom Filter”. Now choose hostname from the dropdown and mention the hostname value corresponding to that of the domain name that you wish to stop showing. This shall bring the matrices back to normal.

What if Google provides analytics users with an option to limit the code usage to a single website rather than being copy pasted to multiple domains? I think this should help. This option is offered in Adsense than why not Analytics?

Also, it can be helpful if you can inject links in your own website using either the noscript tag is using JS or via using an iframe. This will help you gain sitewide links from the scraper websites and should increase your PR.