How to prevent stat sites from getting/publishing my traffic and hosting information?

Question

When I recently googled my website, stat sites came up that had more info on my website than I even knew off the top of my head! Daily traffic, Nameservers, analytics id, etc.

I removed google analytics code from my site... does google analytics share or sell information? It makes me uneasy and I don't like that it comes up when others search my site.

I'm also worried that how low they listed my site worth will confuse customers because we're an e-commerce site whose average item sells for more than what was listed as what the whole site is worth!

1) How are they getting my information?

2) Is there anything I can do?

Answer 1

Google Analytics does not make its information publicly available. The only way to view that information is to successfully authenticate yourself (i.e. log in).

Some hosts have web stats available publicly by default. You need to make sure yours is password protected. But I don't think is an issue as based on the information your provided they aren't able to actually see your web stats.

Nameserver information is publicly available so that shouldn't be a surprise that they know that information. Daily traffic is estimated and publish by sites like Alexa so that's not unusual for them to know about. Your analytics ID is published in your code so that also is publicly available (I'm assuming you mean analytics ID and not login ID).

So basically the information they have is not sensitive or unusual to have. There isn't anything you can do to block any of these but it really doesn't matter anyway as none of it is very useful information.

Answer 2

Do not worry about it and there is nothing you can do. Most of them make that information up and base your site value on the amount of page views they think you get. People know that this is not the value of your business.

There are tons of way to make semi-informed guesses but they are highly skewed to certain types of websites. Google Analytics stats are not used for this and Google does not share it with anyone.

For most common site that gathers stats is www.alexa.com. It does so using a toolbar that people install in their browser. That toolbar gather stats about browsing and then the stats are extrapolated from those. A huge number of sites actually use Alexa's results and then extrapolate from that further (such as guess valuation from page views). As you can guess, the further removed from Alexa, the wilder the guesses!