SEOs everywhere have been fighting the battle against referrer/referral spam showing up as traffic in Google Analytics reports for far too long. The most common spam referrer is semalt.com, but the list is ever-growing. It’s a slippery slope when it comes to filtering out these bots, as some may look suspicious but are not actually malicious traffic.
Google recently started filtering out referral spam in Google Analytics which will help alleviate some of the work for webmasters. However, Google still won’t remove all spam traffic from their reports because it’s nearly impossible to do so.
We recently found a promising solution to supplement Google’s increased filtering that blocks spam bots from showing up in Google Analytics almost entirely. The process includes identifying the bad bots, recording their domain and IP address, creating a filter, and blocking the bots in the .htaccess file of the site.
Is this a long-term solution? Only time will tell. Regardless, we are pleased with the results and will continue to do everything we can to face referrer spam head on.
If you’re concerned about spammy traffic to your site and you’re not a webmaster, we can help you. Contact us today to learn more.
