Every SEO aims to bring traffic to websites to build up their ranking. Unfortunately, there are some types of traffic you want to avoid. Spam referrers are a nightmare for each SEO. Â What is a Spam referrer? And why would you want to avoid it, if it brings traffic to your website?
Spam referrals are sometimes referred to as Ghost referrals. Itâs simply a fake traffic to your website. How it works is, that your website gets âtrafficâ from spam bots (programs that crawls your website). So in another words, you never get an actual traffic, even though it may show up on Google Analytics as if you did. So why do people do that? Well, itâs spam! Different spam referrers serve different purposes. Some redirect traffic to their sites or other affiliated shopping sites, adds or even adult sites. Others can harm your site by removing your site from being crawled, which will hurt your ranking. Some links simply contain virus that can affect your operating system. And other only mess up your GA analytics. So whatever you do, NEVER click the referring siteâs link in Google Analytics. Take the threat seriously and block the spam. There are different ways to block it:
- For WordPress.org users– there are different plugins that you can take advantage of that will allow you to ban unwanted visitors to your site- example: WP-Ban, which allows you to block IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referrer url from visiting your site. That is probably the easiest way to block spam referrals from your site.
- You can also block the spam referrers via .htaccess
- Another way is to apply Google Analytics filters– but that doesnât really solve the problem, it simply filters your GA reporting. It definitely will help to clear up your reporting and will work for sites that are not really hitting your sites. But it may also hide sites that are affecting your sites, so be very careful when applying the filters.
Dealing with spam can be frustrating, challenging and so time consuming. However, it is definitely worth spending the time to protect your site.
With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any problems
of plagorism or copyright violation? My blog has a
lot of completely unique content I’ve either created myself or outsourced
but it appears a lot of it is popping it up all over the web
without my agreement. Do you know any ways
to help reduce content from being stolen? I’d certainly appreciate it.
Hello, You posted a very interesting question. Unfortunately, copy content is a common problem as it is so easy to do and a lot of people don’t even thing about it twice. There are few different ways to protect content of your website:
1) You can register your website with DMCA. They give you a badge you can place on your site warning people against using your website content.
2) Make sure you have a current copyright mark in your website’s footer area.
3) You can use different tools to monitor your website against duplicate content- like Plagium or Plagiarism .
Your question inspired me to write my next blog about how to protect your website content. Feel free to subscribe to my blog and I will post some more details to answer your question. Have a great day!