If you want to spot referral spam, a good place to start is Google Analytics. I will show you to identify it by looking at your metrics and give you a list of some of the most well known spam referral sites.

3 key indicators for MOST referral spam:

• 100% Bounce Rate
• 0.00 time on page
• Multiple hits within seconds of each other

Of course not every referral visit on your website that has a 100% bounce rate and time on page of 0 is referrer spam. Despite what we’d like to believe, a real person could have hit your website from a real referral link and left your page.

There are also instances I have seen where the referral spam did create a time on page, but most commonly you will see 0.00.

Identifying Referral Spam With Google Analytics

In your Google Analytics account, you are going to look at your traffic by source. We are specifically going to look at your referral traffic and see where it's coming from.

Inside Google Analytics in your left menu choose Acquisition->All Traffic->Referrals

This will bring up a list of all your referral traffic for a certain time period.

Look for line items that look like this: High amounts of hits with a 100% bounce rate 1.00 page views per visit and 0.00 avg view time.

You can see that in this example I have 74 hits from simple-share-buttons,com with a 100% bounce rate and 0.00 time on page. These hits are skewing my stats and ruining my bounce rate.

To give you some perspective, at one point I was get between 30 and 50 hits a day from one spam referral site. This type of traffic makes you despise looking at your analytics data.

Now that we know what we are looking for, here is a list of some of the most common referral spam sites. Once you get familiar with these names, you can just pick out like a criminal in a line up!

List of Popular Spam Referral Sites

Here is a list in alphabetical order. The ones I have bolded are the ones that I personally have had visit my site in MASS volumes. The others are popular offenders that I found doing my research.

• ·7makemoneyonline.com
• ·adcash.com
• ·bestwebsitesawards.com
• ·blackhatworth.com
• ·buttons-for-website.com
• ·cenokos.ru
• ·cenoval.ru
• ·cityadspix.com
• ·darodar.com
• ·econom.co
• ·edakgfvwql.ru
• ·forum.smailik.org
• ·gobongo.info
• ·hulfingtonpost.com
• ·ilovevitaly.co
• ·ilovevitaly.com
• ·ilovevitaly.ru
• ·iskalko.ru
• ·luxup.ru
• ·myftpupload.com
• ·o-o-6-o-o.ru
• ·o-o-8-o-o.ru
• ·priceg.com
• ·prlog.ru
• ·savetubevideo.com
• ·screentoolkit.com
• ·semalt.com
• ·seoexperimenty.ru
• ·simple-share-buttons.com
• ·slftsdybbg.ru
• ·social-buttons.com
• ·socialseet.ru
• ·superiends.org
• ·vodkoved.ru
• ·websocial.me
• ·ykecwqlixx.ru

Now that we know what we are looking for and who we are looking for, let’s jump into how to stop referral spam at the source.