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What is a Legitimate Referral?
When someone arrives at your site by way of a link on another site.● Referrals have certain characteristics
including...
● Your hostname and a destination page
A valid referral link
Website “A” likes Joe’s ice cream and creates a link to Joe’s ice cream flavors page.
Joe’s has the best ice cream
Which looks like this to Google
<a href="http://joes.com/flavors.html">ice cream</a>
Host name Destination page
Automated referral spam
● Doesn’t come via a link on another site● Does not include your hostname● Has no destination page● Can result in (not set) entries in your
analytics reports● Interferes with the accuracy of your analytics
Why do they do it?
1. Eager analytics users see the spam links and click to see who is linking to them.
2. Which drives traffic to those sites.3. Where a sales pitch awaits.
Sweet! I got backlinks.
Some notorious Google Analytics referrer spam
● semalt.com● buttons-for-website.com● see-your-website-here.com● 4webmasters.org
How can you block referrer spam?Some solutions won’t work over the long term.
Google analytics exclude filters - No.● Requires ever more filters to keep up with them.
htaccess file - No.● Same problem. Need to continually add to it.● Editing the htaccess file is not for the average user
Can’t exclude but can include
Valid referral links will include your hostname.
joes.com / flavors.html
Host name Destination page
Google Analytics “Include Hostname” Filter
Filters missing or unwanted hostnames out of your analytics reports.
Follow these steps to set it up and test it...
First, sign in to your Google Analytics property
Add your allowed hostnames in Filter Pattern
Use the “|” vertical line symbol and with no spaces, as shown on the next slide.
Format for Google Analytics Filter Pattern
yoursite.com|www.yoursite.com
There are other legitimate sources of traffic to your site that should also be included.● Google itself via its Google Translate service and the cached version
of Google search● Domains/hostnames of sites that you have 301 redirected to your
current site● Add these too to the ones above
|translate.googleusercontent.com|webcache.googleusercontent.com
Vertical line, no spaces.
The entire expression looks like this
yoursite.com|www.yoursite.com|translate.googleusercontent.com|webcache.googleusercontent.com
Where “yoursite.com” is the name of your site and .com or .net or whatever it actually is.
Looks good. (not set) will be filtered out.
If a hostname you DO want appears on the right side, scroll up and add it the filter pattern. When you are satisfied, click Save.
Monitor your results
Using the Google Analytics “hostname include” filter should greatly reduce referrer spam.
Dave Goodwin, Co-founder Scormi | @dgoodwn
http://bit.ly/gareferralspamLink to this slide deck