The Semalt Islamabad Expert On Setting Google Analytics To Remove Ghost Referrer
The spam in Google Analytics has become a serious issue. Because of a deluge of referral spam from the adult sites and social buttons, webmasters have become overwhelmed by all the filters they set up to manage the useless data their sites receive. There is no need to panic because setting up Google Analytics to hide referrer spam is quite easy. But first, you should understand how referrer spam works.
If you want human beings to visit your site and are conscious about the quality of your traffic, you should pay attention to white hat SEO techniques.
A top expert from Semalt, Sohail Sadiq, provides here a compelling practice in this regard.
It may not be possible for anyone to get rid of referrer spam as it skews your statistics and harms your site's ranking to an extent. That is why you should remove it from the Google Analytics account as soon as possible. Darodar.com, priceg.com, iloveVitaly.com, hulfingtonpost.com, and blackhatworth.com are the most common referrers that cause frustration to the Google Analytics users.
If you notice a spike in traffic in the Google Analytics report, your instant reaction could be pleasant. But you should worry about the quality of your traffic and the bounce rate of your site. The chances are that the referrer spam will visit your site with 100% bounce rate and time spent on your site is zero second. Before you assume anything else, you should ask yourself "whether this traffic is reliable or not." If not, you should take measures to get rid of spammers. For this, find out the origin of your traffic. Go to the Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals section and check the traffic sources. Try to evaluate where the visits are actually coming from.
The serious downside of the referrals is that they consume the intelligence of your website and increase the bounce rate, affecting your search engine ranking within days.
The solution to this problem
If you clicked on the HulfingtonPost.com's link or another spam link, you should close your web browser as soon as possible. Then you can reopen it and delete the cookies and history to ensure your safety. It's worth knowing that different types of spam can be dealt with a variety of ways. Some of them have been discussed below.
Creepy Crawler
It creeps about the web and takes information for its own means. It performs a variety of tasks by clicking on your links and inviting you to click on the suspicious links. It mostly comes from different IP addresses, and you cannot block the traffic by excluding the IPs in your Google Analytics account. However, you can block it in your .htaccess files.
Ghost Referral
A ghost referral does not visit your site. Its most common examples are darodar.com and ilovevitaly.co. You might consider editing the .htaccess file, but it is not going to benefit you and is pointless because the ghost referrals are quite powerful to deal with. You cannot block their visits by the whole, but you can keep their track in your Google Analytics account. They intend to fool the Google's tracking and use random tracking IDs to perform their tasks. The chances are that your ID was tracked and recorded by the referral spam, and now referral visits are showing in your Google Analytics reports. You should use filters to prevent the spam and add the suspicious website in the Referral Exclusion list.