Yep ... We all want our websites to be noticed. It makes us happy when other websites link to our articles.
The problem?
Referral spammers will take advantage of this desire by sending fake referrer URLs with automated scripts to thousands of websites.
These URLs will appear in your tracking report (Google Analytics or any other tracking service) as referrers ... and can lead you to click on malicious websites.
And most likely, you will want to explore these sites when you see them in your referral report.
And yes, ... some experts will say that referrer spam is quite harmless unless you click on the links. Which is nonsense ... Why do you have those reports if you don't use them?
But, let’s assume that you won’t click on those links ...
Well, there are still other downsides ...
First of all, if you are small or medium sized website and not a huge, well-established site with tens of thousands of daily visitors, then referrer spam will ruin your sites analytics reports showing you basically false, unreal data entries.
Not to mention, that you could decide to sell your website ... And when you'll share those reports with your interested buyers, these spam links will definitely leave a bad impression on them ...
This is why I've created this short tutorial where I will show you how easy is to effectively block WordPress referrer spam using a plugin and Google Analytics.
Ready?
Let's do this!
Reply
Also today I deactivated G+ from my "Sociable" list in WordPress because I kept getting Warnings from google that I was spamming each time I wrote a post and hit the G+ to post it to Google+ I surely don't want them to cancel my google account. I have had it for many years. If you have any thoughts on that subject I would appreciate it also!
Great training.
Ruben
If you were posting content containing links with the orogonal WA domain included, G+ will consider it as spam (due to the huge number of shares)
If your linked content doesn't contain root WA links, is about your sharing frequency or other issues that could violate the G+ policy
Is stable and there are not too many features that would require an update. That's all. But of course, you can use any plugin you want Jennifer ...
Your training is terrific, and I'm implementing your methods right now--thank you!
Janelle
