Stripping Out Referral Spam
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
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
-
Spam using Hostname so filter not working
Hello, on one of our sites, we have filtered via the hostname. We have done this on other sites quite happily but on this particular new website, when we add in the hostname filter, we still get loads of direct and referral traffic which is junk - and the hostname of these junk referrals are the website's domain. So it seems that this filter is not working or the spam are now using the hostname? Not sure what is going on or how to solve this?
Reporting & Analytics | | AL123al0 -
Keyword Opportunities in Insights Area Suggest SPAM Keywords?
Happy Holidays Moz family, We were recently reviewing our insights on an account and the keywords suggested were: 1. malibog pinoy sex story 2. desi bhabhi ki chudai 3. cennai mamies pundai mulai Clearly these are SPAM or something. We have run malware scans of the site, used Google Webmaster tools to identify incoming and outgoing links and don't see anything. I have also exported the entire site to Notepad++ and searched for these terms. Nothing. Any ideas or suggestions? Thank you in advance for any suggestions! We're having some ranking issues with the same site so perhaps this is the root of the issue. The site has some great links.
Reporting & Analytics | | Tosten0 -
How to configure multilingual site in google analytic? Currently showing in Referral Traffic why?
Hello All, Currently my Multilingual site is showing in referral traffic is it because I have not added hreflang tag on site? If yes and if I add the hreflang tag on all sites when where it will show in google analytic traffic from international sites? And what type of configuration required in analytic? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pragnesh96390 -
Why would on-site search queries show up as referral traffic?
The site analytics have been set up for over a year and suddenly last month there was a huge spike in referral traffic (1100+ sessions). Upon further investigation, the majority of it was coming directly from internally, either as mysite.com or search.mysite.com and the landing pages from the referrals are all /search.html?query=* This was never an issue before so I'm trying to understand what could have changed. I'm following up with the client to find out if their dev team may have changed anything related to their search engine but I'm wondering if there may be another explanation. A few notes: previously mysite.com / search.mysite.com were not in the Referral Exclusion list. I've added them now but this was never an issue before. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | SEMnMs0 -
Is there an efficient way to block/filter referral spam in Google Analytics for a large network of websites?
Hello, everyone - I'm looking for guidance on how to block or filter referral spam in Google Analytics. But I'm needing to block for an entire network of Wordpress websites. We have two networks which total over 2,500 websites. We are currently blocking sites we find out about via htaccess. This works, but only after we see we are getting hit with the spam. Updating 2,500+ Google Analytics accounts with filtering is not an ideal option due to the time factor and the fact that new bots coming out almost daily. We can continue the htaccess method, but does anyone have any other ideas for blocking referral spam for a large network of sites? These are the other ideas we have. 1. Blocking all traffic from Russia and China based up subnets. We know many will still get through, but it should block 50% of it, we hope.
Reporting & Analytics | | copyjack
2. Moving sites to Google Tag manager. This is a huge tasks but we have seen that sites using Tag Manager are not effected, at least for now. Other ideas are appreciated!0 -
Filter the Spam traffic
Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
Google Ad referral
I was wondering if someone could decode the jumble of a referral - this is supposedly the referal that led to a click through to my site via a product listing ad. I am trying to figure out how www.nextag.com comes in to the picture as we do not have refurbexperts even listed there? Thanks to anyone who tries/does work it out. http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CGXud6DmDU_qeL5THygHpuICwCaTZwMYD_Nvvv0bEwMS50wEIBhAEIOn5-gEoBVCl7P7f-v____8BYMnu8omYpPQSoAHAhIv9A8gBB8gDG6oEJ0_QwcNc5zNun_d7S5KNcMT6uPjjH_mMDkKFFgBCQ6aKICRPJVVa7MAFBYgGAaAGJoAHqPv0ApAHAeASupqdo-ypit0m&ohost=www.google.com&cid=5GhZEzUCSC6x9n2wxOdz3-mrAfSUkvHKPN3wD5yLInnlNil_&sig=AOD64_1D1z1JPYbFP0UnUglJVOfvd25RfA&adurl=http://refurbexperts.com/product/527/HP-LaserJet-P2015-Laser-Printer-RECONDITIONED%3Futm_source%3Dproductlistingads%26utm_medium%3Dadwords%26utm_campaign%3Dadwords&ctype=5&nb=0&res_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fhp-p2015-laserjet%2Fproducts-html%3Fnxtg%3D116d0a1c0504-9FFEB16DE52A7E2A&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fgoto.jsp%3Fp%3D3652%26search%3Dhp%2520p2015%2520laserjet%26t%3Dag%253D1384181795%26crid%3D48271786%26gg_aid%3D20169721025%26gg_site%3D%26gclid%3DCjgKEAjwzIucBRDzjIz9qMOB3TASJABBIwL1LHK7GcAPS6yHGpd9Kq3wsZrcPORAWD8QCWivr4W75PD_BwE&nm=11&nx=43&ny=12&is=700x181&clkt=187
Reporting & Analytics | | henya0 -
Spam link? Links from linguee.*
Hello, in a site, in which I'm working .. in webmaster tools i see a lot of links as following: With more links to your site: linguee.es 3.066
Reporting & Analytics | | jarizaro
linguee.com 2.964
linguee.pe 2.722
linguee.mx 2.721 Total inlinks to my site are 20.000, and links incoming from linguee.* are more than 50% !!! My site is about spanish courses in spain, but i think all these links are fuck*ng me. I checked if these links have nofollow tag, and not, they don't have this attritute. What can i do? My site is going down in Google. ¿disavow that domain? Please help.0