Beware: Semalt Warns Of A New Type Of Referral Spam And Ways To Filter It Out

23.05.2018

Beware: Semalt Warns Of A New Type Of Referral Spam And Ways To Filter It Out

Professional SEO and savvy individuals know everything about referral spam. Most recently, a new type of spam named as language spam has been introduced. The language spam penetrates your Google Analytics and can damage your website to a great extent. It can infect your site with the message, "Google invites you to click on this URL. Vote for Donald Trump".

Alexander Peresunko, a top professional from Semalt Digital Services, describes this dangerous type of spam and illustrates how to avoid it.

The rst and foremost sign of language spam was seen in November 2016 when a couple of webmasters con rmed the un ltered views on their websites. They started catching on the language spam and tried to gure out how to get rid of it. Unfortunately, they could not get the desired results, and it kept on destroying their sites.

Another type of spam is when the domains receive low-quality traf c, and the source is always unknown. You may call it referral spam and the domains of referral spam are Reddit, The Next Web, and Lifehacker. These are not innocent sources, and you should be careful while driving traf c to any of these sources.

You might have seen a lot of Reddit threads, where people discuss spam and hackers affecting their sites every day.

You can join those threads and communicate with others to know more about the language spam and referral spam.

https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1677.html

1/2

23.05.2018

It's safe to say that both of these types are interconnected and aim to damage the search engine ranks of legitimate websites.

However, there is no consistency of how hackers engage the users and trick Google Analytics with both language spam and referral spam. The worst part is that they send fake traf c to your sites and generate lots of hits, without any white hat SEO. There are two main ways both referral spam and language spam are sent to the websites. The rst way is through bots while the second way is through arti cial hits. Bots are sent to the sites, generating fake hits in Google Analytics servers. And false hits mean you use a variety of programs and software to get lots of hits, but they are not reliable since no human is reading your articles.

Unfortunately, you cannot stop referral spam by the whole, but you can lter it out in the Google Analytics data.

Experts advise that we can lter out language spam and remove the hits from the Google Analytics report that don't look legitimate. Moreover, you can block the traf c resources as well as the suspicious IP addresses in your Google Analytics account. You should be aware of the fact that the most reliable language settings in the web browsers are 5-6 symbols long and should only lter out the language spam.

It's safe to say that we cannot get rid of referral spam because spammers and hackers keep coming up with new methods. It means they are always around and referral spam and language spam can be ltered out temporarily. You should check your Google Analytics accounts regularly and create lters for the referral spam as it's the only solution to the problem.

https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1677.html

2/2