One of my holiday "quiz" viral type of sites went viral over the past week. I noticed google analytics real time showed a decent amount of US visitors with "not set" under city so I started going through my logs:
66.220.x.x (among other well known facebook ips)
referring URL: m. facebook. com
user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.3.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15B202 Safari/604.1 (or similar)
as well as the usual facebook bot showing up right before or after the above
facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+facebook . com / externalhit_uatext.php)
Thousands of hits and analytics is picking this up as real traffic!
Which got me curious, why are they faking the user agent and referring URL?
66.220.x.x (among other well known facebook ips)
referring URL: m. facebook. com
user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.3.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15B202 Safari/604.1 (or similar)
as well as the usual facebook bot showing up right before or after the above
facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+facebook . com / externalhit_uatext.php)
Thousands of hits and analytics is picking this up as real traffic!
Which got me curious, why are they faking the user agent and referring URL?
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