How to Stop Referral Spam from Invading Your Google Analytics

Is the analytics on your website full of fake hits from referral spam? Would you like to know how to stop these unwelcome “visitors” from spamming your site and ruining your Google Analytics numbers?

The analytics on your website need to be checked daily. First, look at which of your pages have been viewed. Is there a page that has been viewed that isn’t on your site? Next, check out the referrers. Is there a strange web address that is listed under there with an outlandish number of hits?

What is Referral Spam
Referral spam—also known as ghost spam, referrer spam, log spam, or referrer bombing—is spamming aimed at search engines. I believe that it is also meant to drive a website owner crazy. It involves making repeated website requests using fake referral URLs to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Usually, these spammers don’t even visit your website.

Even though referral spam in usually only visible to the administrator of a website, not knowing how to get rid of it can be enough to drive you to the edge of insanity. Some of the referral spam will only register a few fake hits to your site, but others are a bit more aggressive and will register hundreds of hits per day. What is really maddening is when you have two or three or more referral spam sites that do this day after day after day.

Why does referral spam want to show up on your analytics? As the administrator of your site, when you see a site show up in your analytics, you are naturally curious about what this site is, so you will visit it. The bottom line is that they want you to buy something from them.

There are plugins that will help to prevent this spam from showing up on your site, but they don’t always work fast enough if they work at all. The most reliable way to stop referral spam from showing up is to do it straight through Google Analytics. On my site, I had several of these plugins installed, but in the end, they didn’t do the job that I could easily have done myself.

Most of the guides online that explain how to do this simple task are confusing. That is the reason that I didn’t try and do it myself sooner. I’m not brilliant at going into the heart of something like Google Analytics and fixing screw-ups. I just knew that I would ruin things and stop my analytics from showing any visits at all. By the way, I did do that once, but that mistake was easily fixed.

So, how is this done through Google Analytics? First, you must have an account with them. Google Analytics is great at keeping track of how many visitors your site gets.

1) Login to your analytics account.

2) Click on the “Admin” button found in the list on the left side of the page.

3) When “Admin” opens up, you will see three columns: Account, Property, and View. Under “View,” select “Filters.”

4) This is where your filters are listed. You should see a rectangular red box that says “+ Add Filter.”Click on this box.

5) Under “Add Filter to View,” choose “Create New Filter.”

6) In the empty box below “Filter Name,” paste in the site of the referral spam. How do you find out what this site is? On the Google Analytics dashboard on your site, you need to look at the list of referrers. Referrers such as timer4web.com, site-auditor.online, or speedup-my.site are referral spam. You need to copy the needed web address and paste it into this box.

7) Next, you need to select the filter type. Your choices are “Predefined” or “Custom.” You want to select “Custom.” Once you select “Custom,” you will need to select the “Filter Field” to exclude. Click on “Select Field,” and in the drop-down list, select “Campaign Source.”

8) Now, under “Filter Pattern,” paste in the address of the site you wish to exclude again.

9) The very last thing you need to do is to scroll on down to the bottom of the page and click “Save.”

Sometimes, it will take a day or two to rid your site of the referral spam. Other times, it happens within hours.

Since I began doing this, my site has had almost zero hits from referral spam. Why did I say almost zero? New referral spam sites/addresses pop up all the time, and until I tell Google Analytics to exclude them, they will continue to appear. Now that I know how to handle them, they no longer drive me crazy.

Examples of Referral Spam
Below you will find examples of referral spam sites that you will need to ban from your analytics. Just so you don’t mess up and block this site, googleweblight.com is not referral spam. It is Google’s way of enabling mobile users with slow internet connections a way to load articles faster. This site will bring you more readers.

abc.xyz

addons.mozilla.org

blackhatworld.com – This one showed up in my analytics at 9 in the morning on December 13, 2016. I immediately followed the steps I outlined above. Two hours later, it had gone on its merry way.

brateg.xyz

earn-from-articles.com

election.interferencer.ru

free-fb-traffic.com – I let this one go for a day because it only had a few referrals. I just wasn’t sure about it. But the next day, it started to pick up more traffic, so I investigated it. I should have done that to begin with. It is a sharebutton.to, and you don’t want its referrals to your site.

lifehacker.com

petitions.whitehouse.gov – No, this one is not from the White House; it is only pretending to be. When I checked my pages, it appeared as petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/petition-ban-googles-blantant-suppression-free-speech. Once I entered their base address as referral spam in Google Analytics, it was gone in just over an hour. And, yes, I had to refer back to my instructions to remember how to do it.

seojokes.net

sharebutton.to – This spam site proved to be rather stubborn. Getting rid of it as I outlined above didn’t work, but neither did it appear as one of the referrers. It simply appeared as one of the pages that had been viewed.

Follow the same steps until after you select “Custom” in step number seven. Once you have selected “Custom,” under “Select Field,” you will select “page title.” In the box under “Filter Pattern,” you will type in sharebutton.to or whatever spam page you are getting rid of. If you wish, you can then click on “Verify this filter” before clicking “Save.”

It took me two days to figure out how to get rid of this one. When I finally succeeded, I screamed out, “Yes!” That got the attention of everyone around me, but I wanted my victory shout to be heard.

site-auditor.online

speedup-my.site

thenextweb.com

timer4web.com

twitter.com – This one took me by surprise. It showed up in the referrals one day, but I knew it couldn’t be the reason that Vitaly Loves Google—not the name of one of my articles—showed up in my pages read. I do get valid hits from Twitter, but then I remembered that hits from Twitter come from the address t.co. This meant that twitter.com had to be the culprit. And I was right.

I went through the steps I outlined in this article, and just a few hours later, both had disappeared from my analytics. Spammers are tricky, so sometimes the guilty site will appear to be an innocent one.

vc.ru – In the list of pages that had been viewed, this one appeared as vc.ru/n/google-russian-spammer.

ewashingtonpost.com – What reason would The Washington Post have for viewing my site? It appeared in my pages as “from Vitaly.”

webmasters.stackexchange.com

your-seo-site.com

The below group of spam referrers is extremely persistent.

auto-seo-service.org
autoseo-service.org
autoseoservice.org
autoseo-services.net

I wasn’t having much luck stopping auto-seo-service.org, so in desperation, I bought Wordfence for my site. Then I succeeded in stopping them. But a couple of days later, autoseo-service.org began spamming my site. Each time I would manage to stop them, they would change their web address just a little and try it again. It’s been long enough now that I’m sure they’re blocked.

Did the method described in this article work? Maybe. But then again, maybe it was Wordfence. I added each address to Analytics as described here and I also added each address to Wordfence. I’m not taking any chances.

These are only a few of the many spam referral sites out there. Good luck in ridding your Google Analytics of these and all the rest of them.

If you know of any other referral spam sites, send them to me and I will include them in the above list.

Please realize that this will get rid of the referral spam the day you do it and from that day forward. It will not remove the referral spam from your Google Analytics history. If I ever figure out how to do that, I will let you know.

DISCLAIMER
I am not a computer expert, just a writer and the owner of a website. Above, I’ve outlined and explained as thoroughly as I can how I rid my Google Analytics of referral spam. I cannot guarantee that my method will work for you.