The proliferation of spam referral traffic has been a topic of discussion, with many seeking solutions to combat this issue. Whether managing an agency or overseeing your own website’s traffic, utilizing Google Analytics is common practice. It’s likely that you’ve encountered spam within your GA referral reports.
While spam traffic is not a novel concept, its recent surge has become a significant nuisance for webmasters. Although it is undoubtedly irritating, it is not a cause for alarm. There are effective methods to eliminate it from your reports and restore normal analytics.
This article will delve into the nature of referral spam, its implications, and the appropriate and inappropriate actions to take for its eradication. Understanding referral traffic is fundamental before addressing spam referrals. At its core, referral traffic refers to visitors arriving at your site via another website, typically those that have linked to you.
For instance, if you read our article “How the Internet Changes Your Brain” and click through to National Geographic’s website (via the first link), WebFX would appear in Nat Geo’s referral traffic report as WebFX referred you to Nat Geo.
Referral spam, however, originates from fake referrals from sites that may not necessarily link to your site. Some spam referrals visit your site, but most merely trigger your GA tracking code to record a false visit without an actual visit.
This leads to two types of spam referrals: Crawler Referrals and Ghost Referrals. Crawler Referrals, primarily bots, actually visit your site, resulting in legitimate traffic sessions. Conversely, Ghost Referrals are spam referrals that never visit your site but rather deceive your GA code into registering a false session through automated scripts.
These sites are likely not linking to your site, and it’s essential to verify this using your preferred backlink tools. These spammy sites are notorious for having a poor reputation with Google’s algorithms, which you want to avoid as it could negatively impact your site’s rankings and increase your spam score.
Activating Google Analytics’ ‘Bot Filtering’ setting is crucial if not already done. This setting is vital for maintaining clean traffic data from non-spam bots and spiders. This can be done by navigating to Admin > View Settings > Bot Filtering.
Webmasters often become aware of spam referrals when they experience a sudden surge in traffic. Checking your Referral data in GA (Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals) is the fastest way to determine if you are affected by spam referrals.
Spam referrals are not harmful to your site or visitors, as they merely create false statistics in your GA data. They do not infect your site, hack into your server, or steal your data. These visits and artificially inflated numbers are not detrimental to your site or its visitors.
Some site owners are concerned that referral spam indicates black hat SEO tactics, but this is not the case. These spammy sites are not exclusively targeting you or your site but are hitting thousands of sites daily.
These sites use automated scripts to randomly generate GA codes to ‘visit’ thousands of sites across various industries. Since these codes are generated randomly, it’s highly likely that your site will be affected multiple times a week or even a day.
The purpose of these spam referrals is to drive traffic to their sites. By appearing in your referral traffic report, they hope to pique your curiosity and lead you to click through to their site.
Spammers employ various tactics to monetize this traffic, including ad bombardment, redirection to storefronts or affiliate sites, marketing scams, and potentially malware infections. It is crucial to never click on any questionable referral links.
The primary concern with referral spam is that it skews your traffic data. These “visits” can make you believe your traffic is up, leading to potential drops in organic and paid traffic. Spam referral traffic also negatively impacts metrics like bounce rate, average time on site, and pages per session.
If your job depends on increasing traffic, spam referral traffic can cause significant issues if the spam stops and overall site traffic plummets. For SEO professionals working for a company other than their own, exaggerated traffic numbers from spam referrals can lead to major headaches.
It is essential to address and remove this ‘traffic’ from your data as soon as possible. While Google has yet to address this issue, they are likely working on a solution. For now, we must take matters into our own hands to combat this spam traffic.
Avoiding immediate fixes like referral exclusions, hostname filters, and changing Google Analytics tracking IDs is recommended. These are short-term solutions that won’t benefit you in the long run.
Instead, implement a two-part fix to remove referral spam tracking from your Google Analytics data: .htaccess codes for Crawler Referrals and a filter for Ghost Referrals.
Utilize .htaccess to block Crawler Referrals before they can initiate spam sessions. And for Ghost Referrals, use a filter to remove this referral spam from your GA data.
Creating a custom segment for historical data is also important to clean up your numbers. This process involves creating a segment that can be applied to your data to filter out the spam referrals.
Finally, it is crucial to stay informed about new spam referrals and update your filters accordingly. While referral spam is annoying, it is manageable by implementing these strategies.
