The Semalt Islamabad Expert: Darodar Referral Traffic In Google Analytics Stats

In December 2013 a new phantom website identifying itself as Darodar rose to irritate web developers all over the internet. Many developers found this bot in their Google Analytics reports under the referrer traffic subsection. By appearing there, it affects your GA data because it makes it as though your website received an increase in traffic. This isn't the only problem that Darodar presents. The realization that a suspicious website is interfering with your data is equally disconcerting.

Sohail Sadiq, a leading specialist from Semalt, provides here some helpful practice in this regard.

How Darodar messes up your website stats

The Darodar referrer traffic that you see in your web analytics isn't real traffic. Their crawler only hits your site when collecting web data (their reasons for collecting web data invites suspicion). Darodar interference negatively impacts your website engagement and conversion stats. This is because it contributes to the generation of false statistics of total visits, the bounce rate, pages per visit, and conversion rates.

There are a few difficulties in dealing with Darodar crawler. Many webmasters have been infuriated by the site and posted their outbursts online. One of the affected individuals posted the CEASE and DESIST notice they provided the site in a bid to stop them from crawling their site.

The fury among affected web users is understandable given that there are various concrete reasons to suspect Darodar activities. First, the domain was registered for only one year - the minimum required time for registration. Many fake sites exhibit this characteristic. Secondly, the Darodar site lacks a secure SSL connection. And thirdly, the site purports to sell a service that is already free on the web; providing web analytics for businesses.

So, how can you block Darodar?

You can create a custom view to remove the misleading Darodar crawler data from your GA reports. Another method involves creating an advanced segment. These are the two most common ways of dealing with Darodar but web developers have come up with diverse solutions for the same.

Some employ a Robots.txt whitelist when they feel that bots are taking up a significant amount of their server resources. Many bots obey robot.txts directives. The only concern of this method is that you have to remember to include all your important crawlers in your whitelist.

You can also employ a firewall to keep off bots that don't obey robots.txt directives. This method can drastically reduce the amount of resources accessed and used by spam bots, Darodar included.


Other developers suggest blocking Darodar's referrer traffic through the .htaccess file and giving a simple reason for it. The reason could be a clear as like "Darodar.com should be avoided because there's a lot of suspicion about their reason for harvesting data on the web".

The web is still full of complaints against Darodar, but due to the bad press, the site's reputation is quickly going down. It's likely that the site's owners or managers may eventually change their crawler. But for now, you should do whatever you can to prevent Darodar from messing your Google Analytics insights.