Referrer Spam Is Skewing Your Web Traffic Analytics
We all love to keep track of visits to our website. It helps us to see if our latest marketing campaign is working, if the SEO changes have improved our rankings, and just makes us feel good that people are interested in our material. However, the stats we get from Google Analytics can be way off – most often because of referrer spam.
What is Referrer Spam?
Referrer spam is fake or unwanted traffic which shows up in analytics reports. It skews the data to make it look like more visitors have come to your site than really have. Some well-known companies use this to lure you into purchasing SEO services with them or “proving” their SEO is doing an incredible job. It can also have even more insidious purposes so beware.
One of the main methods of referrer spam employs the misuse of the HTTP header with the HTTP referrer field. This field tells your site where the visitor is from and is a good thing. However, this field can be changed extremely easily, and spammers use this to make it seem like visits are happening. There are two main types of ‘trickery’ going on:
Crawlers/spiders and fake referrals – actually make visits to your site. Many spiders are legitimate (like Goggle.com) and “play nicely” identifying themselves as bots. However, those that don’t ‘play nice’ (like seamalt.com) can be a real pain. These don’t identify themselves correctly and can (and often do) identify themselves as a fictitious person, random site, or even use their own domain made to look like a real person visited their site when in fact it was just a bot.
Ghost referrals (like darodar.com) – don’t even actually visit your site. They trick Google Analytics with fancy code to make it seem like your site had a visit. I’ll say it again, No Visit Occurs!
Why Do I Care About Referrer Spam?
Mostly, referrer spam just messes up analytics reports. It makes it seem like more visits have been made than really have. This in turn can give any marketing campaigns or SEO analysis a false picture. Additionally, when you look a little deeper, you may notice a bunch of hits from xyz.com and click on their link to see what’s up. Similar to clicking on an “unsubscribe” link in a spam email, it just confirms things about your website. It can also lead you to offers to fix/improve your website based on dire warnings or false promises. Would you really want to do business with a company that hooked you on these terms? Lastly, you can be listed as a spammer if you add to the problem. By publishing a list of referrers with links like ‘recent visitors’ your site will now be spreading the links to others.
What Should I Do About Referrer Spam?
It will be impossible to totally eliminate referrer spam. Just as soon as new methods to combat it are put into place, the bad guys come up with other methods. Don’t give up, keep doing your best, and just be aware that your efforts will never eliminate 100% of referrer spam. Here are two things you should do.
- Block visits to your website by known referral spammers. There are a number of lists that name the most offending domains, and a good one by Piwik hosts a community list of spammers to help with blacklisting. As of May 26, 2015 there were 48 of the worst offenders listed. A very effective method of blacklisting is to modify your .htaccess file. Add the offending domains, and they will be denied access, thus won’t affect your stats. Many times the spammers are coming from the same IP address instead of just the same domain name. Don’t be afraid to use IPs and domain names in your blacklisting. If you have concerns about fiddling with the system files, there are a number of plugins for systems like WordPress and Dupral that will facilitate the modifications. You can also hire a good web development company to do this for you. The drawbacks are that it won’t block ghost referrals and you have to keep updating as new bad sites pop up.
- Filter Google Analytics results. Since ghost referrals don’t actually visit your site, you can’t block them with .htaccess. Set your filters to hide the main spammers using one of the blacklists on the internet and the spammers that you have identified by looking at the Google Analytics reports. Just like the .htaccess fix above, you could update your Google Analytics filters every day and still not catch all of them. A second fix in Google Analytics is to create an include filter based on valid host-names. If the tracking ID doesn’t belong to your site, filter it out. Using these two filters will cut down most of the referral spam being reported. So far, Goggle has nothing in place to prevent referral spam. They rely on you to use their data in an informed and responsible manner.
What Alternatives Are There?
- Don’t do anything. Just realize that the reports from Google Analytics will have referral spam to a lesser or greater extent. If one month suddenly shoots up with new hits, check the report to make sure there aren’t a large number from a single website.
- Don’t rely solely on Google Analytics. There are other ways to get analytics. WP plugins, hosting solutions, etc. Google is the biggest, but not always the best for every solution.
- Use your webhosting company’s resources. They often have products and excellent technical support that will help you set up filters for your site. Keep in mind that these alternate methods won’t prevent ghost spamming, but at least will assist with more accurate analytics tracking.
photo credit: Spam via photopin (license)