Referrer Spam Explained By Semalt Expert And How To Block It With .htaccess Rules

23.05.2018

Referrer Spam Explained By Semalt Expert And How To Block It With .htaccess Rules

If you are a professional website developer or software engineer and care about the website statistics /analytics data, you probably know about Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics, Piwik Analytics and other data collection and analysis websites. If you notice that some strange traf c and odd visitors spike from referrer sites such as buttons-for-websites.com, darodar.com, and best-seo-solution.com, you should pay attention to improving the quality of your traf c.

Artem Abgarian, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, explains here some practical issues in this regard.

Referrer Spam Explained Best-seo-solution.com, 100dollars-seo.com, and darodar.com are referral spam websites. All of them advertise their products and services online, and the most annoying thing is they offer their services at cheap. However, their https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1737.html

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services are not reliable, and these websites aim to send you fake traf c with 100% bounce rate. As you can see, all of them are ranked on the rst page of search engines. That is because these sites trick your Google Analytics account.

1. 100 % Bounce Rate – they usually visit your pages and leave in no time.

That is why your site's bounce rate is 100% as the visitors are never interested in your content, your site's image, and its services.

2. Excessive Use of Sub-Domains – these websites use a large number of sub-domains to trick both Google Analytics and their customers. They are involved in spamming activities and abuse the clients by ruining their sites with referral traf c.

Analyze Tra c Sources from Referral Spam URL It may not be possible for all of us to analyze the traf c source and referral spam URLs. The best way, however, is by creating a few View Filters in the Add New Segment section. There are no strict rules and regulations that you should follow as IP addresses of the referral spammers keep on changing almost daily. It looks like the spammers have invested a lot of money and time into this business to infect as many websites as possible.

Block Referrer Spam with Apache .Htaccess Rule If you are on the Apache server, you can follow the .htaccesss rules for stopping spam from showing up in your logs.

At the same time, you should not forget that they change the referring links after two to three months. The rules are also updated periodically, so you should follow the updates to have an idea of the current .htaccess rules.

Unlike darodar.com, videos-for-your-business.com offers video production services to its global customers. There are chances that it's a legitimate service, but because of their odd history, you should not risk your website at any cost.

Create View Referral Spam Filters If you don't want to use the .htaccess rules because of their confusing codes, you can create view referral spam lters. These lters will help you lter out the referral spam in a better way. You should go to the View section and check the Filters option. Here you have to insert a speci c code and do not exceed its length over 255 characters.

Exclude Hits from Spiders and Bots One of the most amazing tools to help us combat referrer spam is inside the Google Analytics account. You should activate the Bot Filtering option, which will help you exclude the hits of all known spiders and bots from the View section. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1737.html

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