Ghost Referrals and how to get rid of them
For some of you this may be something you never have to worry about. Others may have been wondering the same thing I have been wondering about Google Analytics. It seems that Ghost Referrals are a pesky little thing that can annoy you like a bug. You see, I have been wondering why a Russian site has been to my sight so many times over the past month and when I looked up the referring domain only to find a huge link with darodar.com in it, it seemed odd.
I knew it was spam but I had to figure out how to get rid of them coming to my site constantly which was sending my Google Analytics Bounce Rate up like crazy.
Part of me said, "Don't worry about it and just keep building and writing" while another part of me said, "No Way! This guy is going down!"
Well he is not going down but he can be filtered from Google Analytics. And by filtering them within my Google Analytics, my bounce rate is showing true numbers again.
Below is copied directly from the the site I have a link to below. It is also the site that gives very detailed instructions as to how to filter out these Ghost Referrals from your Google Analytics.
It will NOT keep these Ghost referrals from coming to your site though.
So if you would like to filter them out just go to this guys site and follow his instructions. He also explains how these Ghost referrals are harmless to your SEO so that was good to learn as well.
Ok back to writing and building my sites!
1. Ghost Referrals
The latest arrivals (darodar.com / econom.co / ilovevitaly.co / priceg.com / blackhatworth.com / hulfingtonpost.com) have been what I call “ghost referrals” because they actually NEVER VISITED YOUR SITE. Using some software magic, they post fake pageviews to Google’s tracking service using a random series of tracking IDs. When they pick a series that includes your tracking ID, Google records a referral visit from their source in your reports.
The latest variant of this attack is to fake google / organic search visits with keywords for your to investigate (like “google officially -recommends ilovevitaly.com search shell”).
Since they never actually visited your site, you can’t block their visits at the server using any website Javascript or .htaccess methods. You have no choice but to create a filter to exclude them (as described below). The biggest problem with these ghost referrals is that they change as quickly as they appear, so you could be continuously building filters for them.
http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12/removing-referral-spam-google-analytics/
Recent Comments
2
Thank you so much Russians do the same on my site.