How To Block Referrer Spam With WordPress Plugin – Semalt Advice

Referrer spam pollutes your Google Analytics account with fake information and uses low-quality traffic to promote your content on the internet. When your Google Analytics account shows lots of views, the chances are that your site has started receiving fake traffic. Spammers use a variety of techniques to generate revenues, and when you click on the referrer spam links their ranking will be improved in the search engine results. Even when you don't click on their links, they will screw up your Google Analytics reports, and you will not be able to share the polluted reports with anyone in your business. Fortunately, some WordPress plugins have been designed to block the referrer spam from affecting your Google Analytics data and accessing your site.

Oliver King, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt, provides here some fascinating issues in this regard.

How to get started?

If you have never used Google Analytics on your website, it's a great tool to get started with. Google Analytics lets you see how the users interact with your web pages. You can also see which articles receive more traffic than the others. It's possible to track the clicks on the links and run split tests. Everyone wants his website to be noticed on the internet, but referrer spammers take advantages of our SEO techniques by sending lots of fake views to our sites. They also insert hundreds to thousands of scripts and codes to damage our site's rank on the internet. Their URLs appear in your Google Analytics and affect countless websites every month.

Why do you need to worry about the referrer spam?

Some might think that referrer spam is harmless and safe unless someone clicks on the links, but it's not so. Even when you don't click on the links, the referrer spam does affect your Google Analytics reports. For small and medium-sized businesses, referrer spam can be a major threat as it will ruin their sites in no time. If you are selling something through your website, you cannot target the desired customers because of referrer spam.

Blocking Referrer Spam in WordPress with plugins

A couple of WordPress plugins can help you keep the referrer spam to the bare minimum. The most exciting thing is that almost all of these plugins are free and can be installed quickly. We are not responsible for the detrimental effects and do not provide unpaid support or instructions, so you should always backup your files before installing any WordPress plugin.

SpamReferrerBlock

It is a free plugin, famous for using automatically updated blacklists maintained by the author. Once fully installed, the plugin is easy to configure and can be added to your site conveniently.

Alternative Plugins

Some new plugins, such as Referrer Spam Blocker and Block Referral Spam, have been introduced a few weeks ago, but these plugins have not received satisfactory comments from critics, so it's not possible to judge them properly.

Please be informed that the WordPress plugins cannot stop the ghost spam from 4masters.org, webmaster-traffic.com, darodar.com, and co.lumb.co. We recommend you to filter out the referrer spam in the Google Analytics account to prevent your site from receiving false referrer visits.