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In the "Moderator Site Analytics" page, Referring Sites provide unrealistic (completely wrong) values, e.g.

borken analytics

and the Search Keywords are equally b0rken:

borken keywords

Please, either fix it or remove it, like this is unuseful at best and misleading at worst.

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    Searching for dolphin sex is how I found Skeptics.
    – yannis
    Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 21:58
  • @YannisRizos Almost same, I did the bermuda triangle pyramid.
    – Kortuk
    Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 22:31
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    Nice job, you almost got me to google "dolphin sex" to see if Skeptics is in the results
    – Zelda
    Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 22:35
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    @BenBrocka Do dolphins have homosexual “blowhole” sex?
    – yannis
    Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 22:41
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    To be serious, I do find the top searched list to be slightly useful (mostly so I can check which questions show up in those searches and edit them). But something like "top referred posts" would be more useful for that than the search terms, to help police popular posts from (presumably) outside users
    – Zelda
    Commented Oct 18, 2012 at 23:53
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    I can see how most of these turn up, actually - except for dolphin sex. The first result for that was youtube so I just closed the tab and went on with my dolphin affectionless life. We get some strange search phrases on SO too, but they usually pan out to be accurate.
    – user50049
    Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 2:21
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    @TimPost except for dolphin sex You didn't click the link in my earlier comment, did you? If you are looking for dolphin sex, you will end up on Skeptics. My first comment was absolutely honest, I was searching for dolphin sex when I first stumbled upon Skeptics (was dating an oceanographer at the time, we had several discussions on marine mammals).
    – yannis
    Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 2:39
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    @YannisRizos Actually no, I didn't see it (tabbed out like mad here). Yep, I'd call it status-bydesign then :)
    – user50049
    Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 2:48
  • @TimPost the phrases may be accurate, the numbers are certainly bogus, in which case the sorting is bogus and the list is way less useful than it could be (knowing that an item is in a prioritised list is less useful than knowing that 99% of your queries are about dolphin sex).
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 6:38

1 Answer 1

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What you're seeing is what Google Analytics sends back, this typically works. Analytics is a bit of black magic, so sometimes you get funky things back.

Since we can't really predict which sites (and when, as it's not a constant for a site's lifespan) will get dodgy data, we can't conditionally decide when to display these stats.

We'd rather err on the side of more data than less, so we're leaving these alone. As with every other analytic data point, just remember to take them with a grain of salt.

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    Ok, but the data in our case is really completely wrong. It just never worked. Is it possible that there's something dodgy in the way you set up our site?
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 21:06
  • @Sklivvz - no, it's setup correctly.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 21:08

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