How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?
-
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc.
What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help?
Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
-
Google Analytics spam has been irritating SEO's and misleading many website owners for years. I recently found an article that does an excellent job explaining what it is and how you can work around it. The reason I say the article is excellent is because the author offers a solution that will: (a) keep profiles clean moving forward; and (b) remove spam immediately from all reports, even historical ones.
Here it is. <a target="_blank">http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/ http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/</a>
-
Hi,
What i did before is just block certain countries for example China or India. I got much better results.
But i will definitely check out this hostname filter solution. Thanks for bringing it up.
-
Hi there
Piggybacking off of what dMaLasp shared above, I also wanted to include a link to a post the company I work for wrote. We share, and link to, some example reports as well there that you can use!
Let me know if you have any questions or need any more help!
Patrick -
A hostname filter is the best solution.
Check this great post: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
-
Probably the best way, actually, is to stop it even before it gets to your site. Using Cloudflare or something similar, you can stop that bad traffic (or at least some of it) before it even hits your site. Another option is to use Wordfence, which is really good at stopping that traffic, as well.
Google recently did say that they have fixed the referral spam issue in Google Analytics, but I am still seeing some of it from time to time.
If you've set up Cloudflare and Wordfence on your WordPress site, you can still set up filters on Google Analytics. The best solution that we've seen recently is to use the site's hostname to set up filters. So, if you look at the referrals from the past year or so, and you look at the hostnames, you'll see the hostnames that are for your site. For example, if your site's GA is for moz.com, then you'd want to set up a filter that only shows referrals that use moz.com, www.moz.com, etc.. Typically, the referral spammers don't know your hostname, so that will filter all of that traffic out.
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
-
Since implementing GDPR, has anyone seen website traffic plummet?
On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jason_Taylor0 -
Google Analytics - Referral traffic being reported as Direct traffic
Hi, I have a link on my www homepage to another subdomain website. Both websites are served on https, and have independent Google Analytics properties. However, the traffic from the www site to the subdomain site is being reported as Direct, and not Referral traffic. Any ideas why? See image provided for context... RCn6HER
Reporting & Analytics | | RWesley1 -
Spam Direct Traffic
Hello, Lately, I have been receiving a big amount of unexpected direct traffic from Boston. After analyzing with Analytivs, this is what I get (please, check attachment). Normally I would be blocking this traffic source straight away from my Google Analytics account, and also blocking this traffic from accesing my servers, but check out the analytic metrics: this traffic represents 12% of my total traffic right now!!! av. session duration is 4:53 !! bounce rate is 72% !!!! pages/session 1.44 !! Service provider is "Microsoft Corporation" who looks like one of the typical spammy service providers. My question is, is this a bot?? what do you think ? Thanks, Luis zUlVHIi
Reporting & Analytics | | Yeeply.com1 -
Stripping Out Referral Spam From Past Reports
Hi, I'm looking to confirm the best approach for retroactively stripping away referral spam (free buttons, SEMalt, etc.). Now to be clear, I already have filters in place to ignore them from current stats, so moving forward I'm fine. However, I'd love to go back and check untainted stats. I've setup segments using a regex to strip the root words away and it seems to be working. I have a regex setup to strip out things like: social-buttons|seoanalyses|copyrightclaims|classifiedads|jobsense|free-share-buttons|e-buyeasy|acrobats.hol|cheap-online|amezon|search-help|qut-smoking and so forth. I've been going through my referral data, noticing obvious spam, and adding their domains to my segment. Is this the optimal way for me to get a clear, untainted view of my past stats?
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
All goal conversion in Google analytics showing under referral
Hi All, I have switched my website from http to https After switching from http to https all goal conversions in Google analytics showing under referral.I have also updated the GA code for https. Please help me out to fix the issue. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Turkish Invasion? Massive influx of non-english traffic
Last month, a client of mine has had a very large increase in irrelevant traffic. This traffic is all being sent by Google from mostly eastern Europe, but also from Egypt and Brazil. The largest influx is from Turkey. The traffic is all landing on only two URL's. The magnitude of this traffic is about 350 visits per day. The main keywords sending traffic are: müzik indirme programları (Turkish which translates to "music download programs") تحميل برنامج اوبرا (Arabic translates to "download Opera") program za skidanje muzike (Bosnian for "program for downloading music") My client is a small nonprofit summer music festival (with a strong emphasis on Opera music) so some of the on-page at least relates to these keywords. But the site is entirely in English. Since the words are related to a traditional sketchy vertical I'm worried that my client site has been hacked. Though, for the life of me, I can't imagine what anyone can gain from this. My questions are: Does anyone have any idea what is going on? What are the potential ramifications of this irrelevant traffic? (I'm worried about the traffic slowing down the site, I'm also worried that 350 visits per day and a 95% bounce rate is going to hurt my clients reputation with search engines) What can be done about it? Thank you for any insight you can provide.
Reporting & Analytics | | JesseCWalker0 -
Can you get local search numbers/traffic out of Google Analytics?
With Google's new local search I am more curious as to market penetration on keywords that are now localized to my different US cities. I understand that you can separate out Google traffic based on regional Google domains, but I am curious if there is an effective way to separate out searches and keywords based on a my local US Metros? If google cannot do this, any recommendations on products that can? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Thos0031