Do you know that ?oogle.com is not google.com?
Google Analytics has become a great target for spammers, where they leave fake traffic that draws innocent web site owners to probe where it came from.
A few weeks ago, The Next Web noticed something unusual while using Google Analytics. They discovered that there is a fake Google domain which opens up as ?oogle.com, and not Google.com. The domain leads to a secret.Google.com, asking people to ‘Vote for Trump’. However, now the website displays a message that says ‘Trump, you did it.’
The unusual part — the capital G seems smaller than normal, which is about the same size as a lowercase letter.
The presence of fake Google was earlier disclosed by Analytic Edge, which said that ?oogle.com isn’t actually Google.com or google.com, but it’s pretending to be by using a special character.
Actually, the letter G used in the fake news is a special Latin Letter Small Capital G, which is also known as Unicode 0262. The small G is part of a subset of special characters that can also be used in funky domain names like https://?.com or https://???.jp.
When you point your browser to ?oogle.com, it’s actually leading you to xn--oogle-wmc.com, which in turn takes you to the following address:
In order to get rid of such spammers on Google analytics under Analytics Solutions section, Google has provided instructions to do the needful.
Although ?oogle.com appears to only be used for Trump spam, other safe-looking links might lead to more harmful websites. Therefore, it is very important to beware of the sites and links that you visit.
