The Semalt Expert From Islamabad: What Is Referrer Spam And How To Avoid It?

23.05.2018

The Semalt Expert From Islamabad: What Is Referrer Spam And How To Avoid It?

Sohail Sadiq, the specialist of Semalt, assures that it's possible to beat referrer, ghost and crawler spam in your Google Analytics account, but you need to know what referrer, crawler, and ghost spam are and how you can lter them.

What is Referrer spam?

If you see that referrer spam is being tracked in your Google Analytics account, you should take measures as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will either create links back to its own website or will decrease your site's ranking in the search engine results. On a large scale, it is not a severe problem but on a small scale, it will send hundreds to thousands of fake visits to a site and will skew your Google Analytics data. Referrer spam usually comes from websites like darodar.com, get-free-traf c-now.com, and free-share-buttons.com. You will see that these sites generate a 0:00 second spent on your site and the bounce rate is 100%. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1836.html

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23.05.2018

What is Ghost Spam?

The ghost spam tends to in ate the visitor data without visiting your web pages. It would have been scraped from the site and is directed to your Google Analytics account. It might also redirect you to strange, third party websites. The ghost spam comes in the form of referrals and randomly decreases your site's rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Eventtracking.com is a website that sends ghost spam to a large number of websites every day.

What is Crawler Spam?

Crawler spam does visit your site but has no interaction with your pages. Its purpose is to get indexed in the Google Analytics account and redirects your high-quality visits to a third party, unknown site. Crawler spam might help you crawl your site, but never bene ts it regarding improved search engine ranks. Spam can come in any form and should not be ignored at any cost. When you get spam, you might be pushed to the SEO professionals to get rid of it.

When you get there, you might be pushed an SEO service of some sort, be redirected to a genuine site as part of an af liate program or end up with a virus of some sort.

How Do I Stop Referrer Spam?

The rst step is to visit the Settings page in your Google Analytics account and click on the Exclude all hits from known spiders and bots option. You can create lters and add the suspicious websites to them to get rid of referrer spam. Another solution is by adjusting the settings of your .htaccess le.

How Do I Stop Ghost Spam?

The best and easiest way to stop ghost spam is by setting up the lters in your Google Analytics account. All the referral visitors of your site can be divided into different categories, and you can create lters for all the categories separately. As ghost spam is random by nature and will not send its duff data to your Google Analytics account, so you should block it through the .htaccess le or at the server level.

How Do I Stop Crawler Spam?

As the crawler spam actually visits your website, you can add its domain name in a lter of Google Analytics and get it blocked. There are various domains, and the list keeps expanding every day. Simoahava.com/spam lter is a popular crawler spam that should be banned in your Google Analytics account.

Searchcommander.com is another similar site that is involved in sending crawler spam to the users.

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