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Better blocker ghosted or ad blocker8/27/2023 ![]() The moral of the story: Don’t click through to the sites listed in your referral reports. With that in mind, think about how it could be used to harm the site and reputation of a spammer’s competitor.Īnother more likely and more damaging reason that spammers use referrals is to expose you to malware and other software designed to steal your information. Spammers can mask the real URL and make it look as if it’s someone else’s. ![]() ![]() The bad thing is, referrer spam cannot be authenticated-you cannot track it back to its actual source. Are you going to have good thoughts about those sites? A more vile reason for sending fake traffic is to possibly harm a competitor’s site-think how angry you’re going to be when you see the URLs coming into your analytics from referrer spam. That’s not the only way a spammer can benefit, though. So ghost and referrer spam may be promoting a site and trying to drive clicks and traffic to it. Now people can use that and change the referrer to be anything they want … some people will set the referrer to be a page they want to promote and then they will just visit tons of pages around the web-all the people who look at their referrers see that and say ‘Oh, maybe I should go check that out’ … whenever there’s a link, it doesn’t mean there was necessarily a link … there are some people who try to drive traffic by visiting a ton of websites, even with an automated script, and setting the referrer to be the URL they want to promote …” “A referrer is just a simple HTTP header that is passed along when a browser goes from one page to another page, and is normally used to indicate where the user is coming from. Here’s how Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam, describes it: The referral works similar to how a link would work. The general idea is to trick anyone who reads their analytics reports into clicking through and visiting the spammer’s site. Why would anyone want to send you fake traffic? They’re able to do this by guessing your analytics code (UA-XXXXXX-1) and tricking analytics into thinking they hit your site even though they never went near you. Spammers have found a way to exploit Google Analytics servers and spoof a session on your site-they’re even able to spoof organic visits and events. Ghost referrals never actually visit your site (hence the “ghost” moniker). Evil might be too strong a word for these types of referrals, but they’re certainly bad. Ghost referrals: These aren’t like Casper the Friendly Ghost. But the not-so-good guys? The spammy bots do not identify themselves and your analytics records them as a visit with a 100% bounce rate-leaving without spending any time (less than a second) on your site. Good bots and crawlers typically identify themselves and as such do not show up in your analytics reports. Normally, they’re harmless and are used to index your site’s pages and content. There are two main types of referrer spam:Ĭrawlers and bots: These are the web crawlers and robots that visit sites. Referrer spam (n.): traffic to your site from bots and crawlers that impersonate a referral visit or referral link Here’s the most basic definition of this problem: What are referrer spam and ghost referrals? Here’s a primer on what it is and what you can do about it. If you’ve ever seen a big spike in traffic to your site only to find that your referral reports show it’s mostly from low-quality or spammy sites, you may have been hit with referrer spam or ghost referrals.īecause this type of spam has a significant effect on the information you receive, keeping you from getting a clear picture of the health of your website, it’s important to filter out as much of this referral spam as possible.
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