Did you observe your Google Analytics Report carefully this time? If not, then probably you should right now, because there has been a huge attack of spammers on the web, who are trying new methods to mess up your website.
Here’s what I mean when I say an Referral Traffic attack –
1. Go through the report, did you notice an increase in traffic?
2. Find the exact site pages where the link occurs, thanks to Google’s help.
3. Go to Traffic Source, then click on referrals in the analytics reports
4. And, the list of sources that are driving traffic to your site
Now take a look at the report deeply. You might have observed that there are some fake referrals amongst the real ones. Links such as;
List of latest referral spam bots websites:
semalt.com
o-o-6-o-o.com
buttons-for-website.com
s.click.aliexpress.com
humanorightswatch.org
social-buttons.com
free-share-buttons.com
googlsucks.com
buttons-for-your-website.com
www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com
contentlook.co
www.event-tracking.com
darodar.com forum
ilovevitaly.co
blackhatworth.com
bestwebsitesawards.com
addons.mozilla.org
best-seo-offer.com
buy-cheap-online.info
ilovevitaly.com
make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com
cenoval.ru
atl4i3util01.web.web.com
youtube-downloader.savetubevideo.com
website-errors-scanner.com
maranbrinfo.com.br
kambasoft.com
4webmasters.org
simple-share-buttons.com
howtostopreferralspam.eu
100dollars-seo.com
sitevaluation.org
непереводимая.рф
sanjosestartups.com
and many more like these, all these are spam links that are not linking to your site, but represent fake referrals.
What do these fake referrals do? Well, the answer is simple they trick you to visit spamming sites. Once you click on these referral sites, they will redirect you to some shady website for online shopping or even a malware site.
What will these spam site links do to your website?
The answer is simply lesser engagement on your site. If you review the data from the analytics reports, you can easily visualize that as a result of increased spam referral links on your website, the engagement numbers are definitely going to see a decline. While you might be dreaming about huge traffic on the site, Bounce Rate, Pages/Session, and Avg. Session Duration are definitely going to see a decline. So, now you can easily have an idea about the impact that these spam links are going to have on your website.
How to get rid of this trouble?
1. Use view filters – making use of the Google filters provided in the analytics report to good use can help you eliminate the trouble caused by these fake referral links. However in order to achieve that you need to try different techniques and use slightly novel filters.
2. Get rid of ghost referrals – if you are not versed with the term, then ghost referrals are ones which are generated in your reports by fake visits and spread spammy data into your Google Analytics report.
3. Taking care of non-ghost referrals – contrary to the ghost referrals, certain spammer bots visit your site and can’t be removed by using simple techniques as are used in non-ghost referral removal. So, you need to find non-ghost spammers and then get rid of them in order to make your analytics report clean.
Follow step by step approach to better get rid from Spam traffic:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en
http://www.cgcolors.com/blog/block-unwanted-referral-traffic-google-analytics-report/
Well, that’s about it from my end for this time. Hope you have understood the impact that these spam bots can make on your website, and how can you eliminate them!
Have a happy experience with the tricks mentioned above and de-clutter your analytics report from all the mess that has been created.