Ask Semalt Expert: How To Delete Referral Spam From Google Analytics

When it comes to finding which domains or subdomains are affected by referral spam in Google Analytics, you may not get the accurate reports until you have adjusted the settings of your account. The false or ghost visits will keep on coming from the historic Google Analytics data too. That's why you should recognize and block them as soon as possible.

In the last few months, a lot of webmasters and businessmen reported about the false visits and referral spam. It looks like the referral spam is becoming widespread every day. Luckily, there are some ways to get rid of it, which Max Bell, a top specialist of Semalt, has described below.

Adjust your Google Analytics settings

The first and best way is to adjust the settings of your Google Analytics account. You must block the suspicious IP addresses and have an overview of what are your traffic sources. For this, you should check your Google Analytics reports on a daily or weekly basis. If you observe that your data is being corrupted with the referral spam, then this is the time to remove them from your Google Analytics account before your site is panelized or banned by the search engines.

Ghost referral spam and Crawler referral spam

There are two types of referral spam: ghost referral spam and crawler referral spam. Ghost referral spam refers to the use of Google Analytics for showing how many fake visits your website received. They are not genuine and have nothing to do with your content. Instead, they give you cent percent bounce rate as no one reads your articles and only pretends to visit your site. Their results are not accurate as you are not receiving genuine traffic. One of the best ways to prevent them is avoiding websites like darodar.com, social-button.com, and hulfingtonpost.com.

The crawler referral spam is the bots that browse your website but are not interested in your content or web pages. They aim to index your site in the search engine results. Just like ghost referral spam, the crawler referral spam is shown in the Google Analytics reports, but most of them are harmless. The best examples are bestseosolutions.com and buttonsforwebsite.com. You can get rid of the crawler referral spam by avoiding the services being offered at these websites.

Advanced Segments

You can quickly remove the referral spam by adjusting and creating advanced segments in your Google Analytics account. For this, you should first check what type of visits you are receiving. Make sure they are legitimate, and if they are not genuine, you should create filters to get rid of them. Alternatively, you can create segments and set up the settings to Advanced Segments before closing the window. You should not forget to give proper names to all of the segments so that you avoid any confusion in future.

It is also good to create custom segments to filter out data from your Google Analytics account. Make sure they are completely removed from the spamming referral domain so that you can resolve your issue within minutes. With this process, you can decrease your bounce rate and can improve the quality of your website traffic.