When is referral spam not referral spam?

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6.7K followers

Kind of an odd title, wouldn't you say? But, there are times where you may think you are getting referral spam, when you aren't. I'll get to why in a second.

First, referral spam is a method used to increase back links to the spammer's website. It is also used to invoke curiosity in webmasters to click through to the site to see what it's all about. This is supposed to help the spammer's search engine rankings as well, so they think. All this is done using automated bots. What is does for your website is skew your analytics.

There are plenty of posts here on WA as well as all over the internet about how to combat it. So I won't repeat that here. Just search for it if you think you are encountering it.

Now, onto when it appears to be referral spam when it really isn't, and is in fact, legitimate. If you advertise using PPC (Adwords, Bing, etc.) you are going to see results appear from various websites as a referral source. These are simply websites that have put Adsense (or Bing) code to display PPC ads (and get paid for clicks). For the purposes of your PPC campaign, they are legitimate traffic.

So, if you start to see strange referral sources, check the page to see if it's from a PPC campaign. If you believe the page is getting both PPC and referral spam, pause the campaign for a couple of days. If it still is appearing in your analytics, then you know it's a mix.

Best Regards,

Jim

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Recent Comments

9

This could easy be over looked thank you for the reminder

Thanks for the tip.

Good tip, thanks

Good post. Thank you...
Ed

Long time no see! Have missed your posts. Good to see you again and thanks for the tip. :)

Hey Julie, it's nice to see you too! I've been busy doing some freelance writing. I'll be posting more in the weeks to come.

Best Regards,
Jim

Excellent point

That brings a new perspective, thank you Jim.

Jim, thank you for this nugget of understanding!

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