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!



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rubanzema Premium Plus
Thank you for sharing.
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smartketeer Premium
Thanks for your time!
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RubenV1 Premium
smartketeer,Thank you. I went as far as adding a filter. I did not add the exclude filter because I was not sure if I have to do each on that long list (500 or more) individually.

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
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smartketeer Premium
If you want to create an exclude filter, is recommended to add as many sites as you can. That's the point ...

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
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CandP Premium
Thanks, Zed. We haven't encountered this problem yet but we will now be on the lookout and implement your suggestions when we do.
Colette and Philip
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smartketeer Premium
Hopefully you won't need it :)
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smokeywins Premium
Thanks for the great info! I am curious about the plugin you suggest. It shows it hasn't been updated in a year, should that be a cause for concern?
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smartketeer Premium
No, the plugin is fine ...

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 ...
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smokeywins Premium
Thanks for the clarification!
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smartketeer Premium
My pleasure!
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jlclayton1 Premium
I laughed when I went back to my email and saw this training because I have spent the last half hour creating exclude filters due to all the spam referrers showing up on my site!

Your training is terrific, and I'm implementing your methods right now--thank you!

Janelle
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smartketeer Premium
Thanks for your time and your feedback Janelle!
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jlclayton1 Premium
I had found that earlier and got it checked! Glad to hear that it cuts down on the bad referral traffic--my bounce rate over the last couple weeks has gone from around 10% to 90%. So I definitely needed to do something--Thank you!
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