Your increased website visits may not be what you think.
It is likely that your referrer traffic has increased exponentially over the past 6 months, and I’m sorry to break it to you – this is likely to not be a true reflection of your website’s performance.
Your referrer data is important – it shows which sites are linking through to you, how much traffic they are sending, and to which page. This information sits within Google Analytics’ Acquisition reports.
These reports are key for telling us how the visitors came to the website. Google Analytics splits this into channels, one being referrer – and referrer data is being spammed.
The rise of referrer spam (or Ghost Spam) will most likely match the rise of your referrer traffic. Referrer spam doesn’t harm your website, doesn’t affect your SEO, but it makes your Analytics referrer and visitor data pretty useless. There are a myriad of other sites, including:
- www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com
- hongfanji.com
- www.event-tracking.com
- success-seo.com
- raffic2money.com
- floating-share-buttons.com
- free-floating-buttons.com
- get-free-social-traffic.com
- video–production.com
- wpthemedetector.co.uk
- nexus.search-helper.ru
- rednise.com
- best-seo-software.xyz
- justprofit.xyz
- seo-platform.com
- qualitymarketzone.com
The first step to take is to block these referrers. Let’s be clear here – you are blocking them from Analytics, not from your website (they don’t hit your site, they hit your analytics data). The second step is to create a Segment and remove the historical spam. If you would like to see your previous data in its true form.
We’ve created a new question in the Ask Pitstop article to show you how to stop referral spam. Click here for the full instructions. If you’d prefer, we can do this for you – contact us and take back your data