How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?

[Armen-SEO]

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?

[DonnaDuncan]

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>

[abgeneration]

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.

[PatrickDelehanty]

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

[dMaLasp]

A hostname filter is the best solution.

Check this great post: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

[GlobeRunner]

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.