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

1. 23.05.2018 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 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. Apparently, 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. A leading expert from Semalt, Sohail Sadiq, explains here how to identify the referrer spam https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1854.html 1/3

2. 23.05.2018 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 ?rst is to use the ?lters and the second is to block them altogether. Filters are an easy way to deny low-quality traf?c in the reports. They are easy to create, and the referrals never get recorded once you have added the suspicious websites to your ?lters. You can edit the .htaccess ?le 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 ?lters to block the ghost referrals It's true that blocking through the .htaccess ?le is easy, but most spammers are smart enough not to let it happen. In such circumstances, you can use ?lters to block the ghost referrals. There are some tutorials to get inspiration from. The ?rst thing you should do is to ?lter the analytics traf?c by the hostname. The ghost referrals and referrer spam show up as invalid hostnames in your Google Analytics account. You should ?rst ?nd their location and block them from the Admin section. Make sure you have blocked all the suspicious websites and ghost referrals using this method. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1854.html 2/3

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