Semalt Expert: Why To Avoid Google Analytics Referral Spam

Nik Chaykovskiy, the Semalt Senior Customer Success Manager, reminds that data is the essence of most internet marketing campaigns. Most website owners and operators depend on efficient data handling skills. Google Analytics spam brings in fake traffic and web visits, making the information on traffic inaccurate. It is essential for people to remove referral spam from their Google Analytics metrics. For instance, you can receive many web visits from domains like Darodar or Ilovevitality.

Google Analytics spam

Google Analytics spam involves any web visits which come to your website from other domains. In some cases, some of the sites which you have backlinks with can cause fake traffic. Referral spam can be of the following two types:

• Ghost referrals: Some domains and websites may get access to your Google Analytics UAID. They record page visits to your GA panel. However, they do not reflect as web visits on your website dashboard. They appear as ghost visits on your GA account.
• Spam bots: In some cases, non-human visitors might click links to your website. In fact, these are not legitimate web visits.

Reasons behind Google Analytics spam

Spam attacks involve several intentions. Like most black hat SEO techniques, spam is a method which violates most rules to get to their target. Vulnerable individuals can fall victim of these spam attacks. Hackers send spam web visits for reasons like:

• Executing malware. Just like conventional internet fraud attacks, individuals place malware information on their competitor websites. They can also perform some crimes such as credit card theft or even steal login credentials. Keyloggers can facilitate crimes like stealing financial information.
• Referral visitors. In some cases, these attacks target at referring people to other websites. They belong to the black hat SEO agencies which promise quick ranking results in a brief time. They tend to employ visits to your sites or page, but do not convert to sales.
• Selling a product. Majority of the Google Analytics spam visits are companies seeking to sell something. By getting to millions of clients worldwide, they hope that one person will convert to a sale. Eventually, they end up disorienting your traffic information when they are trying to make a purchase.

Why and how to fix Google Analytics spam

Spam web visits make websites suffer from getting their metrics not inline to the internet marketing strategy. In most cases, they tend to bring information which does not relate to the way your business is performing online. For most people, applying spam filters in the Google Analytics admin tab can bring a solution to most spam attacks. For instance, spam domain like Darodar can get an error 403 meaning that they do not have the authority to view your website. This spam filter can tend to make your site free from spam. In some cases, people drop codes or .htaccess file on the root of the domain. These files can block web crawlers like those of spam domains.