discuss Fighting a battle against Referral Spam

[News]

Referral spam is when a website sends lots of bogus traffic to your site in order to show up in your site analytics. They hope that you are excited and want to see the site that is sending you tons of new traffic, so you click through to the referrer website.

This type of spam is a major nuisance for a couple reasons. First, it messes up your analytics so that it becomes difficult to tell how well you’re really doing. Second, it uses hosting and services resources. I hit my traffic limit on Woopra (a live stats system) during the last billing cycle because of the spam.

Ideally, I’d like to see analytics services (including Google Analytics) create an easy way to delete a referrer and all of its data (including page views, time on site, etc) from your analytics. A simple (-) link next to each referrer would be a big help...

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[enlytend]

Wordpress plugins that edit .htaccess will only address the tip of the iceberg

Most referrer spam is sent directly to Google Analytics via an API call, They use your Analytics ID and never touch your site so .htaccess is useless.

To get rid of most of it, filter your traffic in Analytics to only allow a valid hostname. (Create a NEW view to do this, ALWAYS keep an unfiltered view of your analytics data!!!!!). Normally this is just your website hostname, BUT if your analytics account tracks data from other hosts, like a shopping cart, you need to configure them too.

Then create a filter to specifically catch whatever that misses. Periodically update this.

These filters only work from the date they are applied, they won't remove spam from older data. If you want to see your historic data without spam, make a custom segment with the hostname / specific filters and apply it when reporting.

Excellent, frequently-updated "how to" resource from a Google Analytics community "Top Contributor" - http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/
(The above resource now has filters for the latest nuisance: language spam.)

Too confusing? Anyone who's Google Analytics certified should be able to set this up for you.

 

[VictorVictories]

One can do the following:

Block the referrer and the IP address that is used by spambot

Block the entire IP range and user agents used by spambot

use Google Analytics feature ‘Bot filtering’ and block spam referrer through the custom advanced filter.