Semalt: How To Spot And Block Google Analytics Referral Spam

For a small-sized business, nothing is better than signing into the Google Analytics account and seeing a lot of traffic coming in. You would get excited to know that your website is receiving various views and may not get into the evaluation of whether this traffic is genuine or not. If you don't have strong social media presence or have not done SEO properly, then there are chances that you have become the victim of Google Analytics referral spam. Inspect carefully if you have developed the backlinks properly or not. And if you don't have the backlinks and still getting lots of views, then your traffic is all fake and non-legitimate.

Lisa Mitchell, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt, knows how to fight referral spam and shares here some practical issues.

Google Analytics spam is more than just a spatter of disappointment when it comes to running a business for a lifetime. Bots can help you crawl your site, but you can never get any sales or income from the AdSense. Plus, you cannot get benefited from Google's tracking services as you are suffering from analytics spam. This can create serious impacts on your perceived data, block the trends and patterns of your site, and get you cent percent bounce rate. Analytics bots can and do occur in a large quantity that is impossible to deal with for small businesses. For example, if you have received plenty of hits and views during this week, and never did any SEO, then you are a victim of this issue, and it should be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

Spotting referral spam

Some of the spam websites make it easy for you to spot them, best-seo-offer, 100dollars-seo, and similar ones. It is easy to spot them because their URLs are present on the internet. Buying SEO services from a reliable company is the only option for your survival on the internet. If you have a digital marketer, ask him to spot the referral spam and get rid of it as early as possible. The malicious websites tend to be legitimate, and you can locate them through random links and fake emails. If someone is trapping you through emails, asking you to click their provided links, then you should keep yourself away from them. Unfortunately, the Analytics spam is something different and much more complicated to spot than the referral spam. Whenever you see references from freemoneyonline or similar websites, it is better to shut their windows down and clear your cache.

Stopping referral spam

Once you have identified the referral spam, the next step is to stop them from ruing your Google Analytics reports. Filters are an easy way to stop them. You can create as many filters as possible to prevent spam visits from being recorded in the Google Analytics. Alternatively, you can get unfiltered views that allow your site to receive only legitimate traffic. Test view, on the other hand, is a copy of unfiltered views where you are free to add different filters to your analytics for testing. Last but not the least, you can opt for the master view option which tests your filters and works automatically to perform your tasks.