The Semalt Islamabad Expert: What Is Referrer Spam In Analytics & How To Block It?

1. 23.05.2018 The Semalt Islamabad Expert: What Is Referrer Spam In Analytics & How To Block It? If you ?nd unexpected traf?c and referral spam in your Google Analytics account, it means your site has been hit by spammers. It is a growing problem for webmasters, marketers, bloggers and social media managers as referrer spam can damage your site's ranking and is tough to ignore. Get down to these compelling tips from Sohail Sadiq, the expert of Semalt Digital Services. 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 in recent years. A new referrer spam that was recently 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 harmful because it increases the traf?c to your website, but you are wrong. Bots and spiders generate this type of traf?c, and the hits you receive are not real. Obviously, it will increase your bounce rate and the time spent on your website is zero second. The ghost traf?c 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. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1838.html 1/2

2. 23.05.2018 How to block referrer spam? You can easily block referrer spam from showing up in your Google Analytics account. For this, you should create ?lters and exclude the suspicious and low-quality traf?c. To exclude that type of traf?c, go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account and click on the Filters option. Here, you have to select the Add Filter option so that the wizard gets started. The next step is to make the ?lter name as darodar.com, link.zhihu.com, or something like this. Make sure you have excluded all referrer spam URLs with this technique, and multiple URLs can also be ?ltered out easily. Choose the Custom Filter option and then select the source of the campaign in the Filter Field section. Here you should also add the darodar.com, or link.zhizhu.com in the text of Filter Pattern to get everything excluded. It's possible to add multiple URLs to the ?lters; for this, you should not specify a URL and can make global or regional referral spam ?lters in your Google Analytics account. By setting up the ?lters and being diligent, it's possible for you to improve the accuracy and quality of your Google Analytics data. You can also protect yourself and your site from dodgy and suspicious URLs and discourage the practices of referrer spam to a great extent. All this will not take time, and the results are always great, so you should keep creating new ?lters for all the suspicious URLs in your Google Analytics account. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1838.html 2/2