Stripping Out Referral Spam

[ChristinaRadisic]

I'm working my way through Google Analytics adding filters to all Spam referrals.

1. Am I doing this correctly:-

Filter > Custom > Exclude - Campaign Source > Filter Pattern - Website address

2. I understand I can also strip out referral spam from past data

Can anyone tell me how to do this or direct me to a blog or article about this?

3. Who on earth are Semalt, and why do they keep changing their URL and bombarding our websites?

Appreciate any help.

Christina

[ChristinaRadisic]

Cheers Ioganr

That does make it easier for me to understand, I'll certainly be ready up on everyone's suggestions today and trying out a regex.

Thank you for your help.

Christina

[LoganRay]

They've been a real pain for all of us over the years, and I don't think there is one best way to handle removal of their junk traffic. It'd be nice if GA would catch up and actually filter this out when you choose "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" in settings. Buuuut, in lieu of that, since Google hasn't caught on yet....

To keep it clean and easy for you to understand when you come back to it, I would do a regex that contains just the domain names of the culprits, pipe separated, like so: semalt|buttons-for-website|other-junk-sites

If Semalt is your biggest concern, you might want to give this a shot: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25477342/blocking-semalt-referrers-with-htaccess-rules

There's also information here on how to block them via IP: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/72107/semalt-ignores-robots-txt-does-their-own-form-actually-do-what-they-promis

[ChristinaRadisic]

Semalt are my biggest problem, I block them to find they are then using another domain name.

I get hit by them hundreds and on occasions thousands of times a month.

Do you know if GA considers them spam?

Cheers

Christina

[ChristinaRadisic]

Hi, thanks for your help.

I think who I consider spam and who GA considers spam could be very different.  Semalt are my biggest problem but they don't show up in Hostname (Audience > Technology > Network > Hostname)

And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to change within the text for the filter pattern, as suggested by the blog:

yourmaindomain.com|anotheruseddomain.com|payingservice.com|translatetool.com

Do I only need to change the first part (bold) to the host name?

Thanks again for any assistance you can give.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there!

I'd like to throw another resource into the mix - check this one out.

To remove it from historical reporting, you'll have to create a custom segment and create regex filters. Analytics Edge has a good resource for this. Check it out here.

Semalt is a webmaster analytics tool that essentially is market monitoring. It tracks your positions and also gives analytical business information. There's a great write up here on Semalt that goes in depth.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[LoganRay]

Hi Christina,

You can filter out spam referrals the way you are doing, but you'll be adding tons of filters over time. The best way would be to utilize regex. There's a really good post of this over on the Moz Blog that covers the best method for filtering out this garbage: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter