Semalt Expert Knows How To Block Referral Spam In Google Analytics

Referral spam annoys everyone, especially a person running an e-commerce website. When looking at your Google Analytics website data, you can witness cases of referral spam coming to your site. It is difficult to estimate and evaluate the actual performance of your internet marketing efforts.

Most of the guidelines about removing referrer spam do not seem to work. In many cases, people invest funds in black hat SEO agents who end up giving the people traffic from referral spam or bots. There are methods which can help you remove referrer spam traffic from your Google Analytics.

Some of the techniques to deal with the spam are defined here by Andrew Dyhan, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt.

What is referral spam

Referral spam is the traffic which comes to your website from other domains. In most cases, any backlinking gives referral spam data to the user. Some of the domains which contain fake web visits are from bots or networks of bots. Referral spam can occur in two ways:

Ghost visits

This referral spam shows up on your Google Analytics page. Similarly, the fake web visits may show up in your analytics data but not on your website dashboard. These anonymous page visits form the ghost page visits.

Crawlers

Some domains may contain traffic bots. Getting web visits from bots can lead to a website getting numerous page visits from non-human sources. Botnets and web crawlers can lead to multiple adverse effects on website information.

In both cases, referrer traffic leads to false information on the progress of the marketing campaign. Furthermore, numerous ghost page visits coming from referral spam make the SEO process challenging to monitor and adjust towards your common goal.

Removing referrer spam

Persons can remove this traffic from their Google Analytics following some simple steps. One of the most effective methods of performing this task is by placing a .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain. This file directs crawlers on the appropriate way to handle your server requests. People using an Apache server can run some commands to make that adjustment. Controlling this process with care is essential. Pulling down the entire website is very easy while running codes.

Advanced spam filters can help in removing referrer spam. In a Google Analytics account, you can use this feature in the admin menu. Moreover, you can be able to add custom filters to the tool. These filters can block traffic coming from a particular domain. It is also possible to prevent traffic using IP address. A secure email service provider can help in the detection of some of the spam attacks targeting user email accounts.

Conclusion

Referral spam can reduce the accuracy of the information on your Google Analytics account. It is essential to remove referral spam traffic as these fake results can lead to resource wastage. Furthermore, this traffic causes people to make wrong decisions regarding the way the internet marketing campaign operates. It is essential for every company or business to deal with referral spam. Some of the ideas which you can use to eliminate referral spam are in this guideline.