Referral Spam? What in the devil is this all about!?

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Over the past week or so I have been getting excessive amounts of sessions on my website.

Exciting at first, sessions and users being 2 or 3 times higher than the average day. Seconds after noticing the spike in sessions for no apparent reason, it hits... RED FLAG!

Put that excitement on hold, something is off!

As I scroll down the page to view a few other key stats I notice that I have gone from having either 0% or very very low percentage for my bounce rate to having "apparent" excessive traffic and 90-100% BOUNCE RATE!!! for 5 consecutive days!

Then digging deeper only to realize that there are little spammy sounding sites or links that all of this "traffic" is originating from. Things like claim65486468.copyrightclaims. org and site50877449.snip.to

change the numbers and throw 'em back at me... ugh

So, that was a bit frustrating but I learned something new as an outcome.. so there is that.

I did get it figured out thanks to members here at Wealthy Affiliate, promptly responding to my questions.

If you have a similar issue, you are welcome to view my questions tab and look at the responses from my/our fellow WA members. Very helpful stuff, just another glorious example of what it means to be a part of the community here!

Thanks everyone, your the best!


Cheers,

- Zach

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Recent Comments

9

aren't the plugins automatically taking care of that?

The spam plugins are great but those handle comment spam. The referral spam that I speak of here is "fake" visitors bombing the hell out of my website with visits that are recorded as "real" visits in my statistics.

Great! right? More visitors!!
WRONG!

The reason this sucks is that it shows 1 page view at 0 minutes and 0 seconds. Making your websites statistics look very much worse than they are in reality. Problem? google sees this as real data... LAME, DUMB, STUPID!

But as I said in the post above, I got the spammers handled. Though, my data is still in recovery and has not yet gotten back to quite as nice of a place as it was before they hit me.. Oh well, nothing I can do but wait. It is getting better and will be back to normal or better than that, all in good time!

good to know 'cause for a minute there you got me really worring

Great info!
Ed

Thanks for bringing this up. I like what Killademon suggested. Will do it before I will also be having same issues.

It has been on the rampage and I have had this as well as other members just go to your filter and block it the other one to look for is snipto, really messes up your analytics 100% bounce rate and click frustrating

Yes these are aggravating and not at all helpful...I had this issue once real bad, was like 60 in a 24 hour period, set up a filter to stop getting them, has helped...

Same as with coment filters, it cuts down on this unhelpful activity that in my opinion is just clogging up the site with meaningless dribble...No need as it does nothing for you and can hurt...

Thanks for sharing!

Another prime example, as well, my fellow WA Friend. What you put out cones back to you. You have been there countless times for others, may God bring the blessing back to you :)

You can use Clicky for real-time analytics or you can get rid of the referral spam, ghost spam, and bot crawlers by setting up filters. https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam

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