In this guide, I will be teaching you how to remove or block referrer spam.
\nFirst, we will start with the basics<\/p>\n
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Referrer spam occurs when your site gets fake referral traffic from bots and this fake traffic is then recorded by Google Analytics (GA).<\/p>\n
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A bot is a program called a crawler which is developed to perform repetitive tasks with a high degree of accuracy and speed.<\/p>\n
Bots are used for indexing web pages mostly (reading contents of web pages).<\/p>\n
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Good Bots:<\/strong><\/p>\n Google Bot is an example of a good-bot. A Googlebot is used by Google to crawl and index pages on the internet. They use their crawl bots every day to crawl web pages of all types. This is how Google has so many up to date site results across the internet.<\/p>\n Good bots obey a file called \u201crobots.txt\u201d but bad bots don\u2019t. Bad bots can create fake user accounts, send spam emails, steal email addresses and can get around CAPTCHAs codes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bad Bots:<\/strong><\/p>\n Bad bots are mostly used in black hat techniques such as:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bad bots use many methods to hide so that they can\u2019t be detected by security. They can pretend to a web browser (like chrome) or traffic coming from a legitimate website.<\/p>\n They send out HTTP requests to the websites with a fake referrer header and create and send fake referrer headers to avoid being detected as bots.<\/p>\n The fake referrer header has the website URL which the spammer wants to promote and\/or build backlink to.<\/p>\n When they do this, it is recorded in your server logs. Google treats this referrer value as a back-link which influences the search engine ranking of the link being promoted.<\/p>\n They can hide from bot filtering used by Google Analytics (GA) and because of this, you can then see spam Traffic in your GA \u2018Referrals\u2019 reports.<\/p>\n Most bots don\u2019t use Javascript but some do. Bots that do use Javascript show up as hits in GA reports and mess up the traffic data and any metric based on sessions like bounce and conversion rate.<\/p>\n Bots that don\u2019t use Javascript<\/strong><\/p>\n Bots that don\u2019t use Javascript on the other hand, (like Googlebot) do not mess up your data. However, their visits are still recorded in your server logs file. They still consume your server resources and still eat your bandwidth. They can even negatively affect your website performance.<\/p>\n If you can\u2019t see a problem in your GA reports but your sites still acting funny check out another article we have written on\u00a0bots that don\u2019t use javascript and how to defend from them<\/a><\/u>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Botnets:<\/strong><\/p>\n Botnets are a network of infected computers that come from different IPs and countries at different rates and are all being controlled by one source. The computers act like zombies if you will, to a leader computer (the spammer). The bigger the network the more IPs which means you can\u2019t just block IPs and limit the rate.<\/p>\n Botnets can also create dozens of fake referrer headers and if they are using a VPN then IP blocking is useless. This means if you block a spam referral by a GA filter or by using .htaccess file there is no guarantee that you have completely blocked it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Infection Bots<\/strong><\/p>\n Botnets get new computers onto their network by infecting them with malware. They become zombies of that Botnet with the end user not even realising it most of the time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sad Truth:<\/strong><\/p>\n If you decide to block botnets, you will most likely block the traffic coming from real people. Whatever you do, though don\u2019t click on the links in your \u2018Referrals\u2019 reports as they might be trying to infect your computer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Go to your Referrals report and sort the report by bounce rate in descending order. You can also download it if you prefer. Look at referrers with a bounce rate of 100% and 40+ sessions. They are probably spam.<\/p>\n It\u2019s definitely not foolproof but try Using GA\u2019s \u201cBot filtering\u201d feature which excludes hits from known bots.<\/p>\n If you still can\u2019t identify it then you might have to visit the site (to make sure it is legitimate). You must have anti-virus\/malware software installed on your site and computer before you visit any website that you can\u2019t identify.<\/p>\n I have put together a list of suspicious sites referred below. If it\u2019s on the list below then chances are, it is a spam referrer and you don\u2019t need to check the website to make sure<\/p>\n\n
Can It Get Any Worst? YES! It Can.<\/h2>\n
What You Can Do About it<\/h2>\n
Check Your Reports<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Bot Filtering<\/strong><\/h3>\n
If You Can\u2019t Identify It<\/strong><\/h3>\n
List of Known Domains<\/strong><\/h3>\n