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
-
Same spam traffic coming from two different sources
This week we did two big email sends from completely separate sources and separate lists. However, in GA I see spam traffic coming from the same city and the same service provider when I look at the report for each source. Screenshots attached. I'm hoping someone can help me understand what I'm looking at and what I should do in the future to prevent. Thanks! g9NTZ5z X5WhYnf
Reporting & Analytics | | eGInnovations0 -
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
Payment gateway referrals disappeared
Hi All, I was getting payment gateway referrals for my site for many months but when I have implemented enhanced eCommerce tracking self referral issue resolved but I haven't read anywhere about this solution so I just want to confirm once . Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Traffic Drop Observations: Google UI, Mobilegeddon
Our traffic has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks while maintaining our keyword rankings. At first, we thought it was due to the simultaneous change in Google UI where they removed the separators between ads and organic results. However, now, we have also noticed that our user devices have gone from ~ 50% desktop/50% mobile to 20% desktop/80% mobile. Just food for thought ...
Reporting & Analytics | | Humanovation0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Has Google changed its algorithm? My traffic has almost doubled and I don't know why.
My traffic has nearly doubled over the past few days, and my conversion rate has doubled as well. It looks like our rankings haven't changed... We haven't done anything to the site recently, although we did submit a couple of press releases through the wire not too long ago (within the last few weeks). I do not think that this is a cyclical/seasonal jump in traffic because last year this did not occur. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | deuce1s0 -
Whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
Reporting & Analytics | | DavidKonigsberg0