Semalt Islamabad Expert:Tips To Fighting Referrer Spam In Google Analytics

Referrer spam is created by crawlers, spiders, and bots with the intention of attracting you to the referral sites and urging you to buy products online. This spam targets your site's analytics stat and has grown. A new referrer spam that was launched is link.zhihu.com. If you visit this URL or a similar one, you will be redirected to a page where the spammers want you to buy their products or promote their content online.

Often referrer spam aims to promote viruses and malware on the internet, and you have to be careful while visiting the spam links and browsing them online. Make sure you get rid of them in your Google Analytics account. You may think that the referrer spam is harmless because it increases the traffic to your website, but you are wrong. Bots and spiders generate this type of traffic, and the hits you receive are not real. Apparently, it will increase your bounce rate and the time spent on your website is zero second. The ghost traffic will not get you positive results and will clutter up with the Google Analytics data. Depending on referrer spam is a black hat SEO strategy and is used by non-legitimate companies and service providers.

A leading expert from Semalt, Sohail Sadiq, explains here how to identify the referrer spam

There are some ways to identify the referrer spam in your Google Analytics account, such as:

• If you don't have the language applied to your analytics data and use something else to describe your site.
• If the hostname is being visited by unknown users almost daily.
• If you have the referral URLs such as darodar.com, and free-website-buttons.com.
• If the site has been hit by Russian spam and the hacker threatens you to steal your credit card or bank information.

How to block referrer spam in Google Analytics

There are different ways to prevent referrer spam in your Google Analytics account. The first is to use the filters and the second is to block them altogether.

Filters are an easy way to deny low-quality traffic in the reports. They are easy to create, and the referrals never get recorded once you have added the suspicious websites to your filters.

You can edit the .htaccess file with this code:

#Stop Referral Spam

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} exampleI\.com [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} exampleII\.com [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} darodar\.com [NC,OR]

RewriteRule.*РІР[F]

This code should be placed along with the URLs you want to eliminate. You can also copy and insert the "RewriteCond" line for all the URLs you may want to block in your Google Analytics account.

Use filters to block the ghost referrals

It's true that blocking through the .htaccess file is easy, but most spammers are smart enough not to let it happen. In such circumstances, you can use filters to block the ghost referrals. There are some tutorials to get inspiration from. The first thing you should do is to filter the analytics traffic by the hostname. The ghost referrals and referrer spam show up as invalid hostnames in your Google Analytics account. You should first find their location and block them from the Admin section. Make sure you have blocked all the suspicious websites and ghost referrals using this method.