A non existent page is showing up on my analytics.

i have removed all analytics from one of the affected sites for 48hrs.

funnily, these co.lumb.co-host visits are still being tracked.

I have noticed the same thing on my website https://improving-your-english.com.

I use Google Analytics Dashboard for WP and co.lumb is showing as a page visited on my site. The referrer is a darodar site as others have mentioned.

How can I go about identifying where this is appearing on my site and getting rid of it? Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

Had the same problem – found this though which is an .htaccess add which blocks the referral. I’m assuming you could modify the code to block visits from other referral spam sites as well.

https://www.sudorank.com/guide-how-to-block-darodar-referral-spam-to-your-website/

I have no idea how to access my htaccess , if I am using blogger is there a way to do this? Is it possible that clicking on the link was harmless?

Thanks for any help

some more findings:

i now strongly suspect this to be related to wordpress and not just generic referer spam or internet background noise.

while the co.lumb pageviews are showing up on all (~10) wordpress sites i manage (even after deactivating Analytics).

the co.lumb visits do NOT appear on any of the non-wp sites i manage.

in the meantime, here’s a guide on blocking this referer spam via your .htaccess file:
https://www.sudorank.com/guide-how-to-block-darodar-referral-spam-to-your-website/

i am setting this up on one site now and will report if it was successful

(Edit: sorry for the double post, didnt see the link was here already)

Hi, thanks for responding. I am having the co.lumb issue on blogger, so I do not think it is just a wordpress issue. Does anyone know how to set up the blocking code on blogger?

i don’t have any experience using blogger, but i doubt you will be able to edit your htaccess file there.

a quick google turned this up: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/52098/how-to-block-referral-traffic-without-htaccess

and the conclusion seems to be:
– Be patient and let Google (or other blog service) block referer spam over time.

hi haw about using Wordfence plugin it will block IP address range: and Referer (website visitor arrived from)

I’m pretty sure these guys never visit your sites, so you cannot block them with the .htaccess file. Fraenk already noted that the visits were still tracked while he removed the Google Analytics code from his site (post nr.47). I had the visits already when testing a new site while nobody (and no search engine) could know the URL of my site. By the way, I’m not using WordPress.

The script with the Google Analytics code can be on any site. As long as your UA-number is in the code, a visit will show up in your Analytics page. Google does not check if it really comes from your site. These guys from Russia seem to run this code on their own servers for thousands of UA codes, which are easy to guess. I also found that the number in the referer URL forum.topic{number}.darodar.com is exactly my Google UA code.

Having the same issue. In analytics it shows up as a page title – Co.lumb but has the URL of my homepage (so no subfolder URL). That would seem to mean to me that someone took the site’s unique Google Analytics code and posted it on another site…. Anyway looking forward to seeing fraenk results regarding the htacess file. What URL are you blocking in the file?

@pauloost you’re right. I’ve tested it on a site having the issue and the pageview is generated without actually accessing the website. A .htaccess rule won’t work!

But there is a solution to filter the traffic based on hostname, have a look at this tutorial, last section:

https://deconf.com/tips-improve-google-analytics-data-accuracy/

Traffic generated elsewhere on the internet will always be ignored and will solve any issues related to Co.lumb thing ??

I also found that the number in the referer URL forum.topic{number}.darodar.com is exactly my Google UA code.

Wow, nice find. That one didn’t occur to me.

This tends to point back to be it being referrer spam, intended to drive visits to that co.lumb thing from people seeing it in their data.

Technically, yes, one can generate any sort of domain to appear in your GA data. GA is run off javascript, and it generates hits back to GA, and those hits can indeed be forged (quite trivially, actually). So if somebody wanted to spam Google Analytics, it’s easily possible.

It’s a *very dumb idea* to be sending spam directly into the Eye of Sauron over at Google, but I’ve seen dumber behaviors.

So is there any risk of Google penalizing sites that have had their GA code hijacked? Is there something like a disavow my code residing on this site for GA or something?

Had the same spam issue with “buttons-for-websites” and was told this code should be added to the .htcaccess file to block it:

# block referer spam
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons\-for\-website\.com
RewriteRule ^.* – [F,L]

Is there something similar that could be added for Co.lumb?