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Is it always a good sign when your website traffic increases? Not necessarily. While higher traffic can be positive, if you notice a sudden and significant surge in traffic, it could result from referral spam targeting your website.
What is referral spam?
Referral spam occurs when your website gets fake referral traffic from spam bots (crawlers). This unique type of spam is visible through your Google Analytics dashboard as a phony traffic referral, a search term, or a direct visit.
A referrer is information sent through the HTTP header when a web browser moves from one page to another. This information can be modified to show any name or link. Unfortunately, some spammers take advantage of this by changing the information to promote their site and sending multiple requests to your website.
These spam bots often disguise themselves when they crawl your website, making it difficult to detect them with security measures. However, the spam traffic will still appear in your Google Analytics reports, which can skew your data.
Traffic is typically one of the most critical factors when evaluating a website’s performance, as it is a primary indicator of the success of your marketing efforts. However, obtaining an accurate measure of your website’s performance can be challenging when referral spam occurs.
Why do spammers do this?
Their purpose is often one of two. They may try to harvest email addresses, scrape website contents, or spread malware.
Alternatively, they will try to get you to follow a link or visit the domain name. This is viable to spammers because they do the same thing to thousands of Google Analytics account users, and it’s likely a significant percentage of these people will click on the link out of curiosity to find out who the ‘referrer’ is.
How will I know if I have been affected?
Following these three quick steps is the easiest way to see whether you’ve become a target for referral spam.
- Go into the Referrals report in Google Analytics and sort the report by bounce rate.
- Look for referrers with a 100% or 0% bounce rate and ten or more sessions, as these are more likely to be spam.
- If you don’t recognize the identity of the referrer, check whether they’re included in this list:
If they are included on the block list, you have likely been affected by spam bots.
How can I remove referral spam?
Besides skewing your data, referral spam can cause other problems if undetected.
Repeated requests can overload your server, leading to sluggish load times for visitors. Slow page loading times can negatively impact your SEO rankings and create a bad user experience.
It’s also possible that referral spammers are trying to find vulnerabilities within your website, potentially opening you up to a whole host of problems.
You can attempt to remove referral spam in several ways, such as blocking the IP address used by the spam bot, but this involves accessing your .htaccess file and adding in code.
We wouldn’t recommend attempting to do this yourself unless you are confident with coding.
Get help with referral spam
If you suspect your WordPress website has been targeted by spam, contact WP Tech Support for assistance. Our team will take the necessary steps to remove any spam detected on your site and advise you on any further security measures that you should take to keep your website safe.
Securing your WordPress website can be complex and time-consuming, and managed WordPress hosting might be the solution you need. Check out our WordPress maintenance plans to see how our highly experienced developers can take care of your website’s security and performance on your behalf.