Google Analytics works in a fairly indirect way; you'll have a little bit of script on your page that calls a larger script loaded from Google's servers. That little bit of script has embedded in it the URL of the website and your Google Analytics ID, which are then passed along to Google's servers where the hit gets accumulated.
Looking at the Google Analytics code, I think it's possible that false positives could occur, either through accidentally, or perhaps more likely through deliberately. There's a history of spammers hitting servers just to get their spammy URLs into the server logs, so that a hapless site owner is tricked into clicking on them. It's conceivable that spammers now try to attack google analytics directly, poisoning the analytic reports with malicious URLs without ever going near the original site. The above is my speculation, but some swift Googling suggests that false positives aren't unknown with Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=76c752308f9c349a&hl=en Best wishes Jeremy On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 5:30 PM, FND <[email protected]> wrote: > >> If you tell me the URL, I can take a quick look. > > Marc has sent me the URL. > As predicted, all I get is a static 401 page that does not trigger any > Google Analytics requests. > > So I can think of a few explanations: > * someone in Brazil has guessed your password > * your own visits are mistakenly being registered as coming from Brazil > * Google Analytics is misconfigured somehow, counting requests from > other locations > > None of those seem very likely, so there might well be other, less > obvious explanations. > > > -- F. > > > > -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] http://www.tiddlywiki.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
