Advanced forms of spam and how to get rid of them
Explained By Semalt Expert
Lisa Mitchell, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, reminds you that an advanced form of spam has arrived, and it might ruin your Google Analytics in a couple of days. You should be worried if your website receives lots of traffic. Make sure the visits you receive are from the legitimate sources, not from the referral spam. A bunch of spambots hit the internet every day, and their visits are from the websites like button-for-website.com, darodar.com, and free-share-buttons.com.
Why spammers use referral spam?
It's safe to say that there are a large number of methods to spam, but the question is who takes advantage of the referral traffic. Another question that might strike your mind is why spammers use referral spam. The simplest and easiest answer to these questions is referral spam is an advertising service for webmasters. The spammers hope that you will see their referral sources and visit their websites to buy their products and services.
The second reason is that spammers resort to referral spam and build links back to their websites. It is because some sites publish their analytics to the internet to create backlinks in a significant number. If you visit these URLs, a link back to their site will be created automatically. It's obvious that the spammers make a lot of money from such stupid techniques. From the advertisements to the affiliate programs and retargeting revenues, they earn a lot and set up several spamming systems to trick the users.
How does spambot get into your Google Analytics referral data?
There are two main ways that spambots get into your Google Analytics referral data. The first is by targeting a large number of websites. Google Analytics makes use of a string number of accounts, and the spambots randomly load your codes into their scripts to fire off the page views on their servers. Let me here tell you that they never visit your website and trick you by creating false impressions. All they need is the Google Analytics account numbers which can generate lots of revenues for them.
Secondly, Google has bots and spiders to crawl and index the websites. Spambots visit your websites, generating page views and the bounce rate is always higher than average. Their data gets logged into your Google Analytics account. In both cases, the bots and scripts aim to fake HTTP headers and will set their referral to any of the links. They want to promote their websites in one way or the other, and when Google Analytics evaluates this data, their links are posted automatically.
Methods to stop referral spam
Here we have discussed the ways to halt referral spam.
Method №1: The Hostname Filter
Some of the referral spam won't come to your website and show specific hostnames. Thus, it is easy for you to create the hostname filter and block those spammers. The hostname should be your website and should have the code such as Shopify and PayPal.
Method №2: The Source Filter
You must have noticed that spammers go directly to your page and use your domains as their hostname. Thus, you should create the source filters to eliminate them as soon as possible. While creating such a filter, you should bear in mind that the number of characters is 255 per filter.
