Semalt Expert - Removing Bogus Referral Visits from Google Analytics

23.05.2018
Semalt Expert: Removing Bogus
Referral Visits From Google Analytics
Have you noticed a lot of referral visits in the Google Analytics reports that look bogus? If that's the case, you might
have the problem of ghost spam – a type of spam that affects a large number of websites and users on the internet.
Unfortunately, Google Analytics provides no solution to this problem, and you never get to know how to block the
spammers. Lisa Mitchell, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, states that the only way to get rid of them is by
sticking them manually with lters. Yes, you can lter them out of the Google Analytics, and that's the only option
you have.
You might have gone through some posts explaining how to use .htaccess les for blocking referral spam. The
experts at Rocketspark provide their customers with useful information on how to lter out the referral spam and
ensure your safety on the internet. What happens if your analytics pro les receive ghost spam? As with the email
spam, referral spam can be ltered or blocked. A webmaster must prevent search engine spiders from indexing the
website logs by moving them to the non-public areas such as password-protected places. He should use the robot
exclusion les or append the nofollow values to the links.
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23.05.2018
It has been observed that referral spam pollutes a lot of Google Analytics
reports every month. Some spammers hit the web servers and your blogs,
creating fake views and tricking your analytics reports. For over three
years, new variations of referral spam have been introduced on the
internet. Spammers use a variety of techniques to damage your site's
ranking in the search engine results. The spammers don't visit the
websites. They only create fake views and trick your Google Analytics
account. If you want to stop ghost spam, you should create lters in
Google Analytics for blocking them. You can follow these simple steps in
this regard.
Step 1
Go to the Admin section in your Google Analytics account. Here you have to select the All Filters section under the
account's column. The next step is to click the New Filter option and give the lter a proper name. You should also
set the Campaign Source in the Exclude section.
Step 2
The Filter Pattern is where you should copy and paste the list of all your domains and subdomains you want to block
from the referral traf c. Keep an eye on how they get separated via the pipe characters, and that vertical line is
located on the keyboard. It is possible to add more than one domain, but the total limit of characters is 255, so you
can repeat the process thrice to lter out all of your websites.
Step 3
Next, you should apply the lters to all of the web pages. For this, you should
click on the Add button and apply the changes before closing the window.
Step 4
You should not forget to click on the Save button. Always remember that the
lters can remove the spam websites from the time they have been added.
So, you will have to wait for a few hours or days before the outcomes are
noticed in your Google Analytics report.
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