How to Stop Referrer Spam?

Lynne Level 1

1

November 20, 2016, 1:40 am

6

How to Stop Referrer Spam?

This is a topic I have brought up before and I have never gotten it right! Searching online gives me instructions on by setting up an Exclude Filter in my analytics but still loads of referrer spam comes through and it is seriously annoying.


During my search today I found something I have never seen before and that is an option within your View Settings to Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders which I activated for all my websites.


Then I noticed yesterday that there is a feature within All In One Seo that blocks bad bots.

I would just love to know what is meant by “bad bots” and would activating this feature block some referrer spam?


That got me thinking maybe there is a nice plugin to block bots from my websites and I had a look and there are plenty! What do you think of adding a plugin to my websites to block bots?


This sounds the most appealing to me since I would prefer to block the actual bots from my website and not just exclude that information from my analytics.

Please share your thoughts about referrer spam traffic and what you do about it! I'm not sure about you but for some reason bot referrer traffic really gets to me. I want them gone!

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CryptoGuru

I have never seen anything like this before. My advice is to use any of this as long as its relatively cheap or even free. My experience with criminals and cyber hackers is that they will code anything to beat any system. Even if this stuff works now all it takes is the right person to come along and code something that can go around this bot stopper and the money you spent is wasted. The worst part about this problem is that you may not notice your software is not working at first. So be smart and use these tools just don't pay alot for them especially if they are open source. I hope my answer helped you make a decision and if you have any questions jut let me know.

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Lynne

Thanks Jkeyz2, I really detest bot spam and I hate the way my reports look at the moment with all this referral spam in it. This referral spam just messes up my reports and I don't get an accurate picture of my website traffic.

I think maybe one of those free plugins will do the trick, I will just wait and see what everyone else has to say.

And yes I totally agree with you, that when one door is closed these hackers will simply look for another way to get in. That is the way it works.

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Everett

I do not like botspam either but be very careful about the bots that you are banning. It's very easy to confuse a bad bot with a search crawler bot. If you ban a search crawler bot from accessing your website it won't be allowed to index any content that your website has, in essence you will stop your website from being indexed by the search engines.

You should do a google search on what IP Addresses the search crawler bots use, and exclude them from your bot lists, or whitelists those bots within your anti referrer bot plugin. Belive me when I say this, do not block search engine bots! I did this without even realizing I did it and my website was never to be found on the search engines.. oops!

However, some plugins give you the option if you want to block a certain search engine bot, if you do not like a particular search engine from viewing your website than you may want to block that, but make sure you keep the most popular search engine bots unblocked.

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Lynne

Ohhhh Everett I was not aware of that. Thank you so much for pointing it out, I would freak out if I did something like that LOL.

It seems the more I try and find out about working online I find out that I know less than I thought.

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Cristian

In wordpress you should have some kind of plunging for managing your comments and filtering spam, I personally never had problems with spam with none of my clients, maybe you should make it more difficult for bots to actually comment on your articles, install some sort of captcha plugin to filter the real users from spam and that alone should resolve everything.

As far as Referrer Spam I always get this in my google analytics for all my pages, you can add them as spam into a special filter whenever you see them, at least this is what I am doing with my clients.

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Lynne

Thanks Cristian, I will check this out.

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