The Semalt Islamabad Expert Provides Tips To Deal With Referrer Spam

Google Analytics is one of the most reliable and powerful tracking systems to date. It helps you monitor the quality of your traffic and increases your chances of earning a lot on the internet. Unfortunately, a shady tactic that hackers and spammers use is referrer spam. They aim to trick with your Google Analytics account, and your site's bounce rate is increased.

Whether you are a webmaster, content marketer, SEO professional or blogger, you should learn the following tips from Sohail Sadiq, a top expert of Semalt.

What is Referrer Spam?

Referrer spam is a strange type of content that shows up in your Google Analytics account, and only webmasters can see it. Referrer spam is actually fake traffic and compromises the quality of your visits. It does visit your site but the bounce rate and time spent on a page are unexpected. A referrer is a link that the spammers share through the HTTP header when the web browsers navigate from one page to the other. Your Google Analytics account will track this information and will show it up as a direct visit, which is actually good for nothing.

Tips to deal with referrer spam:

There are some ways to deal with referrer spam in your Google Analytics account. Some major things you should remember are described below.

Tip#1: Referrer Spam in Piwik:

At Piwik, experts began working on mitigating the referrer spam months ago. If you are using Piwik, it's important to keep this service updates, and you should not browse unknown websites at any cost. With this service, it will be easy for you to exclude referrer spam from your Google Analytics reports and you can keep your date updated round the clock. If you detect a suspicious website in your Google Analytics stat, you must add it to Piwik's blacklist as soon as possible. If the new spammers show up daily, you can add all of them to Piwik's blacklist and can improve the quality of your web traffic.

Tip#2: Referrer Spam in Your Google Analytics account:

Google Analytics doesn't offer any spam protection, but you can manually create filters to ensure your site's safety and security. To create the filters in Google Analytics, you should go to the Admin tab and click on the All Filters option. Here, you should create new custom filters that exclude the referrer spam based on your settings. In the Filter Pattern section, you can enter all the spam domains and get them eliminated within seconds. The best part of this technique is that you can exclude any referrer spam link and don't need to use any special tools. Even when you receive multiple requests from the spammers, you can create numerous filters and exclude all of them to improve your analytics statistics.

Final thoughts:

If you want to avoid multiple spammers at a time, the above two tips will work best for you. First of all, you should develop some understanding of what referral spam is and how it affects your Google Analytics account. You can also protect your site by changing the settings of your .htaccess file, but that's an optional thing.