Fake traffic- how to deal with it.
Hello, everyone,
I haven't spent much time with my sites recently being drawn away by family matters and my work. But I still kept checking with WA and my site's GA statistics. I've expected them to plummet due to my negligence, but (surprisingly) it's behaved better, than I was afraid of. Instead, it turned out to be quite funny and made me guessing, for which I will need your HELP.
Of course, instead of average 10-15 visits per day I was receiving before I've "quit" (well, temporarily) publishing and sharing new stuff, there're 5-8 visits per day remaining. I could feel myself very proud for the high quality of my posts, causing reader's attention, if I didn't check details of GA.
Almost half of my traffic came from Sharebutton.to. It is the site that uses referral spam indexing tactics to give spammers benefits of improving their ranking and promoting their sites. So, it's a fake traffic and your first motion would be to block it. Why?
Well, first of all, the fake traffic messes up your statistics, making it harder to understand the true situation. Second, the fake traffic usually bears 100% bonce rate, ruining your site's reputation in the eyes of Google itself (what a nightmare!). Also, it may affect your site's performance (given the high number of hits). So, it's BAD and let's get rid of it.
There are two ways (what I'm aware of) to block referral spam.
First is to create a new filter in GA, name it (sharebutton.to) and forget about it. The negative side of this method is that you're only blocking it from being viewed in your GA. The actual hits will continue, applying all negative effect they may bear.
The second method is to block this spam at the source, preventing GA from accepting this hits. For that you should edit your (.htaccess) file by adding a few lines:
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} sharebutton.to [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
NOTE: Very important- backup your site before editing- mistakes can be fatal.
You can access it from cPanel (if you have one) ->Files-> File Manager, from your Dashboard using plugins (those using Yoast already have "Edit Files" feature, others can install other plugins, allowing file editing), or using FTP Clients, like FileZilla.
You may need to create this file if it doesn't exist on your site yet. There are also various ways to do that, I'm not going through them now (the basic way is to hit the Save button at your Settings-> Permalinks page in your Dashboard, but, apparently, it doesn't always work).
It is a bit technical procedure, but it's doable for anyone.
But Now comes the funny part.
Instead of bringing the high bounce rate my fake traffic bears only 6.67%! It's a WAY better my most successful posts can do.- at best, they make around 50% bounce rate. My site's overall bounce rate is 59%, which is not too bad, and Sharebutton has made its contribution to it (otherwise it would be around 80%, I assume). At the same time, the time on page is 0 sec, normal for fake traffic.
I'm asking our Google experts- does this kind of fake traffic make positive or negative impact on my site?
I appreciate your feedback.
Kirill.
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Fake traffic. That could be a tough one to deal with, Krill. Someone here at WA community may have an answer.
Would be nice if you can get info from GOOGLE.
Marcel..
Hi, Marcel. Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, like in most situations, Google gives way too much info to filter through.