Google Analytics Referrer Spam: What is it and How To Deal With It
Posted July 21, 2016
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Everyone knows that your Google ranking has a huge impact on your business, what with most potential customers going online to find businesses and 3/4 of those customers staying on the first page of suggestions. So anything that hides the information you need to figure out how to get on that page is trouble. That is why referral spam drives website owners batty.
What Referral Spam Is
When someone follows a link from another source, such as a link through another domain, to your domain, you get what is known as referral traffic. Google Analytics tracks this through the browser requests and uses this information when determining your page ranking. A lot of good referral traffic increases your rankings.
Referral Spam is when a crawler program (called a bot) contacts your website from other, generally suspicious, websites. Spammers do this by rewriting or leaving the HTTP header field blank when their browser visits websites.
This traffic does nothing for your rankings since they aren’t actually visiting your site. It can also lower your rankings because Google uses quality and relevance of links to determine rankings, and they demote the rankings of anyone with low-quality links. This is after the spam bots clutter your site analytics, hiding important information about your website from you in a load of bad data.
The spam bot’s real purpose is to put their spammy domain name on your site analytics so that you visit their website, thus boosting its rankings with real traffic.
How do you identify the spam referrals on your Google Analytics? When you go to your referrals report on your Google Analytics account, some of the domain names will sound suspicious, such as hulfingtonpost.com or adcash.com. The big give away, however, will be the bounce rate. The bots will have a 0 or 100% rate. They often don’t have a screen resolution listed either.
If you have to visit the websites to see if they are spam, make sure your anti-virus and anti-malware programs are installed. The spam websites can carry viruses and malware.
Ways Of Eliminating Referral Spam
There are a few ways to make sure this bad data goes away and stays away. One common way people try involves creating a filter for your sites. Google Analytics lets you do this in a few simple steps.
- Go to your sites Google Analytics and navigate to Admin
- Click on All Filters
- Click on New Filter button and create a Custom Exclude for Campaign Source
- Enter domains you want to exclude using Regex and formatted as ‘domain.’ with a ‘|’ between domain names
You can find referer spam blacklists from a variety of sources. One of the best lists is from Perishable Press. Filters work well to keep out the big offenders, such as semalt.com and iloveitaly.ro, but you have to update these filters regularly because spammers create more websites.
It may be more convenient to go to the view filters on your account and click on Add Filter to View. Type in Hostname Exclusion or Screen Resolution Exclusion in the Filter Name box. Put ‘yourdomainhere.tld’ under hostname, or ^\(not set\)$ in the Filter Pattern box. You can also exclude from your view by certain keywords. To do this:
- Type Referral Exclusion in the Filter Name field when you go to Add Filter to View
- Click on Custom under Filter Type
- Click Exclude and pick Campaign Source in the Filter Field
- Type the obvious spam words such as ‘cheap’ and ‘seo’ in the Filter Pattern Field, separating the words with ‘|.’
Another way to keep spam referral out is to add to your .htaccess file the code ## SITE REFERRING BANNING ReWriteCond %{HTTP_REFERRER} domain [NC, OR] RewriteRule .* – [F], with the domains from your blacklist going after the %{HTTP_REFERER}. Adding this code to your site will keep the spam from ever registering on your analytics page.
You can add similar code to your .htaccess file to block rogue user agents and IP addresses. To block IP addresses add:
RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymlinks Deny from (range of IP addresses) Allow from All.
To block user agents add RewriteEngine On Options+FollowSymlinksRewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} domain [NC]RewriteRule .* – [F,L].
Prevention
It is important to catch this sort of thing early, so take a few simple steps to keep the spam referral out.
- Use a firewall
- Check your server logs at least once a week to catch anything that slips through
- Be on the look out for unusual spikes in traffic, and make a note of when it is from bots. You can use custom alerts to tell you about them.
- Go to your Google Analytics account’s Reporting View Settings and use the feature ‘Exclude hits from known bots and spiders.’
Referral spam is annoying, and dealing with it can require help. If you have any questions about this, or any other aspect of SEO and web page ranking, contact us. We are a leading company in SEO strategies, and we want to share our expertise with you.
