{"id":320,"date":"2017-12-27T16:16:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T16:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nickiong.com\/simplesprout\/?p=320"},"modified":"2021-04-13T03:28:35","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T03:28:35","slug":"is-your-website-getting-referral-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickiong.com\/simplesprout\/2017\/12\/27\/is-your-website-getting-referral-spam\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Website Getting Referral Spam?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lately I\u2019ve noticed a huge increase in spam referrals in my Google Analytics, along with the Analytics of clients\u2019 accounts I manage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What is referral spam?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Referral spam is the web traffic your Analytics system references as referrals to your website. It\u2019s often easy to identify referral spam, as it typically doesn\u2019t make sense to have a link from these websites to your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you drill down further, you might see that traffic from these sites spikes to several hundred visits on a single day or over just a few days. More often than not, this traffic doesn\u2019t continue over an extended period of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What\u2019s the problem with referral spam?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First of all, don\u2019t worry. There\u2019s nothing that these spammers are inherently doing to<\/em> your website. They aren\u2019t hacking into it by creating referral spam. They are, however, trying to get you to click through to their website. So, whatever you do, do not click the referral spam links from your Google Analytics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As this article<\/a> puts it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clear intent is to cause webmasters to go to an unfamiliar site when they see a reference in their Google Analytics reports. Whether the motivation is to generate traffic to their site or to cause webmasters to visit a site that will download malware is unknown.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The second issue with referral spam is that\u00a0it is skewing your Google Analytics data. With even\u00a0a few\u00a0instances of several hundred visitors apiece from referral spam and your data will be extremely altered for the month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n