The Scourge of Referrer Spam Is On The Rise Again

If maintaining accurate Google Analytics metrics are important, you should be aware that referrer spam has been on the rise. It will not only make your metrics less reliable but if left unchecked, will damage your rankings and put you on search engine blacklists.

I wrote an article about this back in 2016 for ArtsHacker and while there are still some useful points, it should come as no surprise that spammers evolve. As a result, you need to up your game at blocking them.

To that end, there’s an excellent article by Matteo Duò in the 7/26/21 edition of Kinsta’s user blog.

Referrer spam, or referral spam, is the technique of making repeated website requests using a fake referrer URL, often to a site that spammers wish to promote.

The solutions covered in the article range for “anyone can do it” to develop-only level actions so there’s no reason not to review what’s there and identify anything you can put in place.

How to Block Referrer Spam in Google Analytics (Clean up Your Reports)