Ask the Experts: Spam Referrals Part 1 – Spam Bots

This post by toinfinity will tell you what are Spam Bots and how you can deal with them.

Have you ever logged in to your Analytics account and seen a massive sudden spike in sessions? At a glance this could also make you think that your site has had a massive influx of customers and therefore you would be hoping to make more sales. However, on a closer inspection at the source of these sessions you may see a massive spike in referral traffic coming from sites that you don’t know. Many times these sources are from what is known in the industry as “spam bots”.

Of recent more and more websites are being crawled by these referrer spam bots, making it appear as though more people have visited your website. These negative spam SEO bots can also skew your Analytics data by a considerable amount, especially as these bots can appear as though they have visited many times, have a 100% bounce rate and provide no other positive data, which in turn can throw out all of your other data (e.g. conversion rate, pages per session etc.)

H2: What is a spam bot?

A ‘bot’ is an automated program/engine that executes actions without the need for manual input. They’re written to carry out repetitive jobs that would take a real person hours/days/months to complete, whilst taking the bot just minutes. In this particular blog, the referral bots are created to visit (or crawl) your website for one reason or another.

H2: The difference in legitimate bots and illegitimate ones

The genuine bots are mostly from search engines such as Google or Bing and crawl your website to index your site, to show all your pages in their search results. All bots have the ability to disable analytics tracking which is why these ‘good’ bots won’t appear in your results, the spam bots intentionally leave the tracking in. To understand why the spam bots do this, we need to look at who is causing these spam referrals.

H2: The Most Common Spam Referral Bots Are:

• Free-share-buttons.com
• Social-buttons.com
• Event-tracking.com
• Get-free-traffic-now.com
• Semalt.com

There are several variations around these sites but the intent is simple; their URL appears in your Analytics, your curiosity makes you follow their URL to find out what they’re about, which then gets them free advertising that you have had to work for. The services these sites offer are illegitimate. For example, one spam referral you may see is called see-your-website-here.com. As the name suggests, they can get your own website to appear in other people’s Analytics results by paying them a fee.

Leading US digital design, development and strategy firm Viget, have created a list of the most common spam referral bot sites by TLD and country code. This list is constantly updated.

To read more about spam bots, spam referrals and why they cause problems on your website, read part 2 of the blog here