Semalt: What Is Crawler Spam? How To Prevent It In Three Simple As ABC Steps

1. 23.05.2018 Semalt: What Is Crawler Spam? How To Prevent It In Three Simple As ABC Steps We use Google Analytics to monitor our site's traf?c and gather data about the visits and hits. Meanwhile, it is also important to get more information about spammers and bots and the ways they affect our sites. Hackers and spammers aim to trick our Google Analytics data for personal purposes. They send bots and malicious things to our sites, thereby preventing us from getting good search engine rankings. Ivan Konovalov, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, explains that there are two major types of spam referrals: crawler spam and ghost spam. The ghost spam always manages to trick the Google Analytics account into logging the fake visits even when the bots have never visited your website. Crawler spam, on the other hand, does actually visit your website, but it is tough to identify whether it was engaged in your web content or not because the bounce rate is always 100%. What is crawler spam? At this point, we hope that you have improved your knowledge about referral spam and are ready to have an insight of the crawler spam. The crawler spam really visits your blog or web but has no interaction with your content or articles. This type of spam is more common than the ghost spam because it does not take lots of resources to build crawlers. In fact, the internet is full of crawler spam and is often used by Google, Bing, and Yahoo to index a large number of sites. The aim of crawler spam is to lure people to buy products from af?liate links. Spammers and https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2005.html 1/3

2. 23.05.2018 hackers keep spreading the crawler spam bots on the internet and attempt to get links back to their own websites. Furthermore, they use crawler spam to de-index your site from the search engine results. How to prevent the crawler spam in three simple steps? Since the crawler spam actually accesses your website, the hostnames look valid and reliable. Unfortunately, it will not appear as ghost spam and instead increases your bounce rate. The crawler spam shows valid hostnames and distinguishes itself as the valid visits, but has nothing to do with authenticity. That's why the prevention of crawler spam is a necessary measure if you want to ensure your site's safety and protection. Step 1: Identify all of the spam domains and website names: Step 1: Identify all of the spam domains and website names: To identify all spam domains and sites, you should log into the Google Analytics accounts and follow these simple steps: 1. In the left side, you should navigate to the Acquisition option; 2. Choose the All Traf?c option and go to the Referrals button; 3. In the primary area of the Google Analytics account, you should click on the Hostname option to identify the crawler spam; From here, you can identify if crawler spam is sending you fake visits or not. Step 2: Create the regular expressions: Step 2: Create the regular expressions: Once you have identi?ed the crawler spam, the next step is to create regular expressions in the following way: traf?c2cash\.xyz|darodar\.com|buttons-for-website\.com We would like to recommend you to put it along with Notepad and TextEdit, so you will refer back to the main page. You don't need to edit the expression with the '|' – sign as it will stop the expressions from performing their functions. Step 3: Set up the custom ?lter and exclude the spam domains and website names: Step 3: Set up the custom ?lter and exclude the spam domains and website names: The third and ?nal step is to set up the custom ?lters and exclude all the crawler spam domains. For this, you should remember the following steps: 1. Go to the Admin panel of your Google Analytics account. 2. In the top menu, click on the All Filters button and select that red-colored Add Filter option. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2005.html 2/3

3. 23.05.2018 3. Once the ?lter is created, you should add the suspicious domain names on it and don't forget to verify the ?lters to ensure that all issues have been addressed. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2005.html 3/3