Problems with referrer spam

ImperialLegionary · Apr 2, 2015

My new site has been hit with traffic from Samsara, Russia and it's messing up my Google Analytics data. I looked around and decided to ban .ru from my website altogether because I don't want any spam bots to use up my server resources. Is this a good idea? Would Google penalize me for banning a whole country from my website or do they not care? Sorry if these are stupid questions, I'm not very knowledgeable about this.

RuthSam · Apr 2, 2015

I tried this with another country, it didn't hurt my site, on the other hand, I lost alot of potential customers on that part.

cottonwolf · Apr 2, 2015

just try to ban the domain from cpanel or htaccess

ImperialLegionary said:
My new site has been hit with traffic from Samsara, Russia and it's messing up my Google Analytics data. I looked around and decided to ban .ru from my website altogether because I don't want any spam bots to use up my server resources. Is this a good idea? Would Google penalize me for banning a whole country from my website or do they not care? Sorry if these are stupid questions, I'm not very knowledgeable about this.

Adam718 · Apr 2, 2015

If Russian traffic isn't valuable and/or there aren't ways to monetize it, then there should be no problem with it.

ImperialLegionary · Apr 3, 2015

cottonwolf said:
just try to ban the domain from cpanel or htaccess

There's too many IPs and it's always changing. And yes like cottonwolf said, Russian traffic is not important to me.

bahus · Apr 4, 2015

Banning them in htaccess doesn't not work because they don't visit your website. You can only filter them out in GA, exclude traffic from host or referrer or both.

artuurs · Apr 4, 2015

As I am aware, this referral traffic is fake and it actually doesn't visit your site, only messes up Analytics. Happened with me too (different spam source tho). Simply create filter on Analytics, to hide them.

Idk if I am allowed to post links, but this is a very useful tutorial to create a filter on GA:

http://www.ohow.co/block-social-buttons-simple-share-buttons-referral/

Problems with referrer spam

ImperialLegionary

Junior Member

RuthSam

BANNED

cottonwolf

Regular Member

Adam718

BANNED

ImperialLegionary

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bahus

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artuurs

Registered Member

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