Filters for referral bots ineffective
-
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I've been trying to block spam from my client's analytics for over a month and I just can't seem to get it right. I am beyond frustrated.
Here is a list of the filters I have:
And here is referral traffic from them regardless:
Specifically this is what the filter looks like. Am I doing something wrong here?
I have also put a filter in place to block traffic from Russia, and it doesn't seem to be working 100% either.
On top of that, it seems anytime I do manage to block something, another site just pops up in its place. Is it endless?
My clients are very small local business and this is absolutely ruining their analytics. I can't even show them their traffic reports since it's absolutely meaningless with all this spam. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-
Thank you for the quick response. Made the changes you suggested and hopefully over the next few days I'll see the effect.
-
The filter verification takes a small sample of data and sometimes in that sample there won't be any change.
Another reason for what you may get this error is because the filter was saved before the verification, so you will have to delete the filter and create it again for the verification to work. Better yet you can use the filter expression in a segment it will give you a better idea of how the filter will work since the segment is not limited to a few days.
If you try to exclude by the offender don't use referral as a filter field use Campaign Source.
For the filter based on valid hostnames, there is no need to put the domain with and without "www" clientsite.com will match both.
Hope that helps,
-
I've tried the method you suggested for one of my client's sites. I created a new filter, did "Include" -> "Hostname" and added the following:
translate.googleusercontent.com|www.clientsite.com|clientsite.com
It said that it wouldn't change any of the data when I went to verify the filter, which should not be the case. Most of the traffic is from hostnames that are not set. I tried this input as well after reading a different article on the subject:
translate.googleusercontent.com|www.clientsite.com|clientsite.com
Once again to no effect.
So I tried to tackle the referral spam itself (although for this particular site, direct traffic seems to be getting a fair amount of spam as well). I created two filters ( http://imgur.com/ShhAYqv ) that included every spam referral I've ever gotten:
adviceforum.com|social-buttons.com|semalt/.com|free-share-buttons.com|buttons-for-website.com|best-seo.com|darodar.com|semalt.com
dailyrank.net|sitevaluation.org|trafficmonetize.org|4webmasters.org|100dollars-seo.com|webmonetizer.com|event-tracking.com|.*(social-buttons.com)
And, as you can see in the picture, it says there would be no effect.
Aghhhhhh! What am I doing wrong here?
-
I have recently followed Carlos' blog posts and have to say the steps worked a treat. Hopefully the Google Analytics team are working on a way to transfer filters across different analytics accounts to make it easier to keep all sites referral traffic free.
-
Hi Kat,
If you want to exclude the spammer you should use Campaign Source as a field type, instead of predefined filter use:
- Filter type Custom > Exclude
- Filter Field > Campaign Source
- File Pattern Box enter the spammer you want to exclude. You don't need to create a different filter for each one; you can create an expression like this:
4webmasters.com|free-share-buttons.com|trafficmonetize.org|morespammers
The backslashes before the dots "." and the dashes "-" are needed because custom filters use Regular Expressions. You can keep adding up to 255 characters after that you have to create another filter
If you want to try a better solution, I recommend you to try a filter based on your hostnames.
This solution requires a little more time to set up, but it has three huge advantages over the Campaign Source solution- You will stop the spam before it hits you, adding a filter for the referral after you see it will stop it, but by the time you apply it you will have already hits of the spam.
- You will need only ONE filter to stop all ghost spam, instead of creating various sets of filters.
- Lately, some of the spammers(e.g. free-social-buttons) have been hitting GA accounts with fake direct visits along with the referral, the filter for the referral won’t stop the direct visit, on the other hand. The Valid hostname filter will stop ghost spam in any form whether it shows as a referral, keyword or direct visit.
This is what I've been using on my accounts for, the last moths and I haven't received a single hit of ghost spam the vast majority.
Here are a detailed guide and more information about all these solutions and spam in Google Analytics.
http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/
Hope it helps,
-
I've tried setting up filters in the manner you explain on your site, and yet when I go to verify it, it says that it wouldn't affect my data. I most certainly have spam data from the last seven days so I'm uncertain why it's not working.
I entered in names just as you did in your article, excluding from a campaign source:
dailyrank|sitevaluation|trafficmonetize|4webmasters|100dollars-seo|webmonetizer|event-tracking|free-social-buttons
-
You need to set the exclusion for campaign source, and not the ISP domain.
I highly recommend setting an include only filter for your own hostname.
https://www.marceldigital.com/blog/2015/06/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Filter Remote Workers Traffic
For the most part in the past our company has worked on location. So filtering internal traffic was as simple as filtering out our company IPs as well as a few remote workers IPS. Now a large number of employees are working from home due to Covid-19. I am seeing an uptick in traffic that is clearly employee-related. I am hoping some of you who work with large remote teams may have some suggestions on how to best filter out traffic from remote working employees. I found a few articles from a couple of years ago where people were using a cookie but not sure we can get that implemented in time as our Dev team is backed up. Any help is much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | RMATVMC0 -
Query on Product List Position After doing filters
Hi All, I have implemented enhance ecommerce with tag manager now I am implementing Product List Position so I have query that if visitor do filter or do sorting via highest or lowest price at that time do we have to show List position too? If yes then how and if No then why?
Reporting & Analytics | | Arnold3
Thanks!Mitesh0 -
Filter Tracking works fine at staging site but not on LIVE site why?
Hello Expert, For my ecommerce site I want to track filter url's like price range, size, width, color etc and fully filter url should display in google analytic. I have implemented filter tracking at staging server and it works perfectly but on LIVE site it not show me full filter url. Do you guys think any parameter which i have configured in search console affect this? Note - I have configured in this way - http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/93008/how-to-track-a-product-filter-in-the-product-list-view-with-google-analytics My filter url's are given below. And in search console I have configure two parameters. 1) effect - Sort, Crawl - No urls 2) FT - effect- ( - ) , crawl - Let google bot decide. But as per me this parameter is for crawling should not affect tracking right? mysite.com?FP=0&filtSeq=Price&Sort=BS
Reporting & Analytics | | adamjack
mysite.com?FT=7581&filtSeq=Type&Sort=BS
mysite.com?FT=1042&filtSeq=Colour&Sort=BS In robot file nothing is block. In analytic it showing me url till mysite.com only where as in staging it shows me full filter url. Thanks!0 -
Google Analytics View Filters
Using the same GA property, I would like to set up three filtered views: 1. Tracking across one subdomain and one primary domain (example: shop.example.com & example.com) 2. Track only primary domain (example.com) 3. Track only subdomain (shop.example.com) Can this be achieved by using view filters? If so, how do they need to be set? Also, according to this article: https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-subdomain-tracking-in-google-analytics, with cross domain tracking, I need to ignore self-referrals, which can only be done at the property level. If set up to ignore example.com referrals, will this cause problems with filter 2 and 3?
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
Is Google doing anything about the spam referrer plague in Google Analytics?
My client manages 15+ websites and we have observed the spam referrer issue has gotten steadily worse and worse in the last few months. I took the time to weed out the worst offenders via traffic filters but our referral traffic source garden was quickly full of weeds again a few weeks later. Does anybody know what the Google Analytics development team is doing to combat the spam referrer issue? I find it quite amazing that Google goes through the asinine effort to block out organic keyword data ("not found" & "not provided) but they don't seem to care about blacklisting/filtering spam referrers. RHnE6Wx
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB3 -
Question on regular expression for filters on GA
Hi guys, I am creating profiles on some of the countries sites in my network, and have managed to establish the filter for tracking certain url patterns, for example: ^/japan-english- is tracking all my urls in the Japan site that start by japan-english great! however, it is not tracking the japanese instance of the urls. The pattern for the latter is : www.mysite.org/jp/japan-english I could then modify the filter to track the jp subfolder like this: ^/jp/japan-english- but it will then only track the urls on the /jp/ subfolder does anyone know the regex command for tracking the two url patters as follows: /jp/japan-english- & /japan-english- thanks in advance david
Reporting & Analytics | | BritishCouncil0 -
Do Google Analytics filters affect link building?
We recently made a few link wheels for specific product pages. We've been having great results with all of the wheels except for one. The one we are having issues with is the only link that we were using a Google Analytics filter on; it looks like this http://domain.com/page.htm?zSource=Specific Keyword%tracking My question is does Google ignore links that are obviously utilizing their analyitcs custom filters? We're doing some more testing to try to find out if it truly is the link or if the wheel is a bad one. There are so many things that could go wrong but with so many of our link wheels working well, I wonder if the filters are what is causing such results.
Reporting & Analytics | | MichealGooden0