Is Google doing anything about the spam referrer plague in Google Analytics?

[RosemaryB]

My client manages 15+ websites and we have observed the spam referrer issue has gotten steadily worse and worse in the last few months.  I took the time to weed out the worst offenders via traffic filters but our referral traffic source garden was quickly full of weeds again a few weeks later.

Does anybody know what the Google Analytics development team is doing to combat the spam referrer issue?  I find it quite amazing that Google goes through the asinine effort to block out organic keyword data ("not found" & "not provided) but they don't seem to care about blacklisting/filtering spam referrers.

RHnE6Wx

[RosemaryB]

Thanks for the detailed response!  Our biggest concern is that we might accidentally filter out bona fide referrers via this method.  It might be worth a shot though.

[Carloseo]

Hi Rosemary,

The solution seems to be more complicated that it seems from their end. The last I see is that the GA team is preparing some guidelines to deal with this problem.

Solution or Guide, meanwhile you can use a more efficient solution, a filter to INCLUDE only valid hostnames. All ghost spam uses either a fake hostname or is not set. This method requires a little more effort to apply it, but it has 3 huge benefits over your current solution.

• You will stop the spam before it hits you, adding a filter for the referral after you see it will stop it, but by the time you apply it you will have already hits of the spam.
• You will need only ONE filter to stop ghost spam, instead of creating various sets of filters.
• Lately some of the spammers have been hitting GA accounts with fake direct visits along with the referral, the filter for the referral won’t stop the direct visit, on the other hand. The Valid hostname filter will stop ALL ghost spam in any form whether it shows as a referral, keyword or direct visit.

This is the method that I've been using for my accounts, and once applied it doesn't require maintenance unless you add hostnames. You can find a detailed explanation of how this filter works and a guide to set it up in this article.

http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

Hope it helps,

[EGOL]

<rant>I see the same sites appearing in my "Crawl Errors" report in Google Webmaster Tools.  The noob coders who publish these sites muck up the URLs and they produce 404 errors.</rant>