If your business depends on how high your SEO traffic is, you probably feel happy when your website analytic suddenly shows drastic spike. However, if those traffics come from spam sites, the high traffic will not do you any good. Fortunately, there are things you can do to prevent spam sites ruining your traffic. Jared Gardner, SEO expert from San Diego-based Red Door Interactive, has solution to prevent spam sites from ruining your traffic and making your website vulnerable.
Why You Must Stop SEO Traffic from Spammers
SEO traffic must come from genuine users to be valuable for your website engagement. Unfortunately, spammers have been quite common in the last decade, despite Google efforts to increase security and algorithm system to detect black hat methods. There are good reasons why you must avoid spammers from ruining your traffic:
Your Website Will Become Vulnerable
Many spammers have network sites they use to send bots and referrers crawling through your website, and many of them can do harmful things such as getting your personal information or hacking your website.
Your System Will Be Overloaded
When spammers send referrers and bots to your website, they use your servers. This means your website can experience lagging and slow response because of unwanted visitors, which lead to lower rankings and negative impression from genuine visitors.
The Analysis Data Will Be Corrupted
Imagine if you start a small business with only hundreds of visitors per day. If spam referrers and bots make up 60 or 70 percent of your traffic, this means you cannot properly analyze traffic that comes from genuine users.
Gardner listed several domains that have caused SEO traffic mess by sending spam referrers and bots, such as See-Your-Website-Here.com, Darodar.com, Semalt.com, Buttons-for-Website.com, ILoveVitaly.com, and Econom.co.
See also:
25+ High DA Social Bookmarking Sites List Referenced for SEO
25+ Dofollow Web 2.0 Sites List Referenced for SEO
How to Stop Spam Referrers from SEO Traffic Analytic
Here are best tips from Gardner to stop spam referrers and bots from ruining your traffic:
- Using analytic filter WordPress plugin. After going to Admin page, you can choose filter options by going to “Filter” section. After getting a new view of unaltered Google Analytic reports, arrange to filter based on certain categories you think important. For example, if there are countries that give you spam issues, such as Brazil or Russia, simply go to “custom” option and choose the category, before adding the country names. Make sure you spell the names correctly.
- Using Wp-Ban. This WordPress plugin enables you to block certain host names, user agent, IP address, URL, and IP range, which you think are spammers. They will not be able to visit your WordPress blog or WordPress-based website after you add their names in the plugin.
- Block directly from .htaccess file. If you use Apache as server, you can directly block spammers from the root domain by changing .htaccess file. You can actually remove them from your servers, and if you have technical skill, you can even try redirecting those spammers back to their sources. However, this is a risky move, because one character mistake can make your entire website to be taken down.
Spammers and spam referrers will not stop creating havoc in SEO traffic, but there will also be methods to keep them from ruining your analytic.
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