Hey everyone! I am new to this forum and I was wondering if any of you guys have experience with referral spam? Recently I have seen an increase in referral traffic to my site and everything is spam! There are multiple solutions on the internet but I was wondering what the best one is!
Are you worried because your analytics data gets all crewed up? Trying to solve this via .htaccess can be a pain in the butt. A more effective way of blocking spammy bots is through your analytics filters (assuming you're using Google analytics). Try to go that route.
Assuming that you want to get rid of spam because it messes up your analytics, I suggest you read this article from Moz on how to stop spam bots: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
Better still, just ignore it. Referral spam is a distraction and a time waster. They're hoping to get some sort of visible credit (like a link) on your site. Way, way back I helped develop a stats package and one of the features was that you could promote your top sources of traffic. It was quite the thing to do back then. And then the spam started, people wised up and moved on.
Track those referrals. See where you have submitted your site that might caused to receive referred traffic on and on.
Seriously? don't waste your time trying to work it out. The spam is just that. They have a program loading urls into a curl request and hitting your site. It's all to do with them wanting traffic after you spot the spam, don't reward them!
Hey everyone! Thanks for the replies! I did some more research myself and came across this great infographic explaining everything there is to know about referral spam: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2015/11/remove-pesky-referral-spam-in-google-analytics.html
That's the only useful part of the infographic. Unless you are intensely testing strategies on your site and you have enough traffic to rule out other sources of statistical error I don't see any value in fighting this battle.
I tried using the google analytics filter process but that didn't work. I've had multiple spammers jamming up my analytics. By updating your htaccess file for your website you can block the spammers but if you don't know how to code it's hard. I was very fortunate to find a solution after hunting around for a while. If your website is run on wordpress install the plug in All In One SEO, which has a bad bot blocker facility. It lists the most common spammers but you can add every website that jams up your site and it will update your htacess file to block them for you. You may see some of the more annoying spammers still trying to access you site for a while but eventually they'll die off. They often attack from multiple countries but if you ever find an IP address of someone you don't want to access your site this code in your htacess file will ban them from accessing your site. Order Deny,Allow Deny from 193.169.87.38
There is a filter within your Google Analytics account admin and you can set it to block those known spam traffic.
This segment can be imported from the Analytics solutions gallery to clean up the report history, and then can be easily maintained to add new spammers over future months - https://www.google.com/analytics/gallery/#posts/search/%3F_.term%3Dsearch%20commander%26_.start%3D0/
Google Analytics doesn't filter as well as directly updating your websites htacess file does. There are a few sections you can create a filter for unwanted spam using analytics but analytics doesn't block all spam, use its filter and some will still get through. You also have to decide what filter to use so you have to take time work out how each of the many options works. For someone who wants something simple that works the All In One Seo wordpress plugin is the better option, if your website runs on wordpress that is. Also although google has what it says are the most common spammers I've added at least 15 spammers addresses to my bad bot blocker in All In One Seo that were said to be common and weren't listed in Google Analytics.
I tried many method and now I forget about it, just focus your energy to get more valid traffic, once your site have enough traffic, those spam traffic only small percentage which won't affect your overall statistic that much.
Some times back I wrote a piece on this in here, also in our blog. have look at it here: http://www.alexanders.co.nz/blog/google-analytics-referral-spam/ This might help you.
Maybe you did something wrong. WordPress plugins might work when you have a WordPress website, but what will you do with other websites? Setting filters in Google Analytics is still the best option
You cant get rid of it. Ive been trying for years. Matt Cutts said that Google filters these links out. I did all the htaccess rewrite rules and banned ips but nothing worked. Most long time webmasters ignore it. As for analytic's I've seen some tools out there that take referral spam out. Good luck with your endeavors!