Say Goodbye To Referral Spam
For too long Google Analytics users have had to suffer through Referral Spam. It was so problematic that the internet was littered with makeshift ways to remove the spam from your analytics.
What is Referral Spam?
Referral Spam is when someone makes repeated website requests to your site using a fake referral URL from whatever website they want to advertise. When the site that was spammed publishes their access logs they will have inadvertently provided links to the spammers site, giving them a boost in search engine rating.
What is Wrong With Referral Spam?
Google Analytics are a great way to see and understand the traffic that is coming to your website. Referral Spam skews your analytics and cause a huge uptick in your sites bounce rate, making it look like its performing worse then it is. Though the spam did not hurt the afflicted site, filtering through it was obnoxious.
Google’s Fix
As of March 7th Google Analytics automatically filters out Referral Spam so that you no longer have to. The change does not appear to be retroactive, only reports from February on have the filter. It is worth noting that in the real time view the analytics still show the spam, so Google must be applying the filter after to show a more accurate report. The SEM Post’s article has more information about the new update. It is certainly exciting to know that Google is continuing their fight on spam and attempting to give their users the best possible interface.