What to do when your website encounters fake traffic or gets nullified by spam content?
These are serious issues when you are looking to find endless SEO traffic. There was a time when spam content used to hit your email inbox. To tackle this filters were created by email providers blocking those spam emails. The filters were really capable to remove the issue.
But, years after that the spam found a new victim and it’s none other than your Google Analytics account. It’s no more hidden that Analytics data is crucial for SEO goals. But, when fake and spammy data enter your site, it becomes tough to measure the effects of SEO.
Through this article, you’ll come to know about 6 different kinds ways to filter spam SEO traffic that enter your Google Analytics account. You’ll also know how it enters and how to remove it at the same time in the content.
Why Spam SEO traffic Causes Troubles to Website?
Let’s start with an example to understand this. Suppose, your website is receiving a good amount of traffic but still leaves scope for better. One day, you saw a spike and that looks really amazing.
You are really amused, but on closer inspection, what you found is that is a fake traffic and your website has been spammed contaminating your analytics data and stopping you to measure the performance of your SEO campaigns.
Sites scoring immense traffic on daily basis, a little spam SEO are affordable, but smaller sites may incur a huge problem because you won’t be able to make a definite marketing analysis as most of the traffic remains fake. The problem doesn’t end here as your server load is going to create a new one. More the traffic, more overloaded would be the server. As such, it’ll decrease the page loading time of your website and allow bounce rate to increase hampering the SERP ranking of your website.
What causes spam SEO traffic?
Bots are a real threat to your SEO traffic although there are some good bots like GoogleBot that essentially help your site boosting on the internet. But, there are some devil-ones as well that can hack your traffic and steal your content.
So, what to do in this condition, go through 6 tremendous ways to filter spam SEO traffic in Google Analytics.
1) Filter Your Analytics Traffic
The first thing to do in order to block the spam SEO traffic, filter the Analytics data and thus you could understand what unnecessary things have been removed.
To start this, you need to create a separate view in your Google Analytics account and refer it “bot traffic filter”. It’s quite easy to do-
1) Go to “Admin,”
2) Click on “+” icon on the “ALL WEBSITE DATA” menu available in the right column.
3) Now, click on “Create a new view,”
4) Lastly, set a right time zone.
The last step is important as you won’t be able to compare two similar things if you stick to Google’s default time zone i.e. Pacific Time.
2) Filter the Known Bots
As mentioned above, you need to block all bots that come across your SEO traffic. But, what more celebrating here is that you’ve the opportunity to remove them with a button available in Google Analytics. It removes all known bots and saves much of your time and effort. Google updates it whenever it finds new bots.
In the new view created above,
- Go to “View settings” menu
- Now click on “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.”
3) Include Your Spam Referrers
Undoubtedly, Google Analytics traps known bots and also block them, but there are mischievous ones that may slip through the net.
To catch these new bots, open your referrer report before classifying your descending data notified by the bounce rate. Those having the most bounce rate need to be at the top.
Employ the advanced filter which enables you to see only sessions that went beyond a certain threshold and that threshold will depend on the amount of traffic you get, but 50 could be an optimum number.
After that check out the list and find which sites are valuable for adding to your referral list. You may find someone there as well.
4) Set up A Bad Referrer Filter
Go back to your new view and create a “Bad referrers” filter. Don’t do this at the account level but at the view screen, and here’s how to create the filter:
To set up a bad filter referrer, you’ll have to go back to “new view” and there make a “Bad Referrers” filter. See, how you can make the filter-
1) Go to “Admin,”
2) Choose “View” and then click on “Filter,”
3) Choose “Add Filter” and create a name,
4) Choose “Custom” followed by “Exclude,”
5) In the “Filter Field” section, click on “Campaign Source” and input the pesky domains.
5) Filter Spam Traffic from Specific Countries
When you’re going to block spam traffic from certain countries, it is recommended you should about the specific countries bringing more spam traffic and less real traffic.
What to do?
1) Open your “Admin” tab,
2) Make another new view
3) Then click on “Filters” followed by “+New Filter Button,”
4) Lastly, filter or block all spam traffic from countries giving you problems.
6) Block Bad Bots
Blocking bad bots is a difficult task as if even a wrong character used would ruin your website. This is why you should keep a backup first and you have access to the server.
You should use .htaccess for this, and the command is:
- Rewrite Engine On
- Options +FollowSymlinks
- Deny from 123.45.67.89
- Allow from all
Remember, you can’t copy this code and paste as it requires being included in your .htaccess file. It’s a perfect way of removing the bot slowing down your site’s traffic and also checks bots from getting to your site in the first place, thus they won’t hamper your Google Analytics data anymore.
Conclusion
You never know what could hamper your SEO traffic and Google Analytics data, but what you need to have the knowledge and measures to uproot all such issues.
Here are 6 important ways by which you can block SEO traffic in your Google Analytics account.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents