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What is Keyword Cannibalization and How to Find, Fix, and Prevent It
In the realm of digital visibility, securing a top position in search engine rankings, such as those on Google, is crucial. However, have you ever...
There is a buzz among webmasters about the spam traffic coming in from spam URLs, mainly from Russia and countries which have no relevance to your business. Scan your referral traffic and don’t be happy looking at the sudden surge in traffic, as this increase in referral traffic is pseudo. For those who are still unaware of the situation, let me just take you back from where it all started with one of our clients.
Just the other day, when I was struggling to analyze traffic at Google Analytics and Booom! What I saw was a stupendous surge of traffic coming in from Russia on my website just in a single day. At first instant, I got super excited but later on I paused to do a double check of the stats. As I went on to dig further, I realized that these visits were featuring under direct traffic. . The rate of percent of new visitors, average time on site and bounce rate figures are appalling.
So, I decided to first look at the referrals traffic to see from where such a massive traffic came? As soon as I delved deeper into my research, I found out the culprit. This voluminous traffic came from Russia from ‘forum.topic darodar.com’
When I clicked on the link, it redirected to various shopping websites. which had an Adsense motive.
HOW’S IT POSSIBLE AT ALL?
Spammers use all the data which is freely available like the UA number of your account and the data analytics code. Spammers then use the code and account number on their site after which the data gets recorded in your account instead of theirs.
This is the biggest dupe ever seen to trick Google Analytics traffic worldwide. Hence, to counter this attack from spammers, Google Analytics (GA) has announced that it is adding bot and spider filters to exclude traffic from known bots and spiders. But, now the question arises as to how to find such bots and spider spammers. Don’t worry, as per my observation, I am listing several sites which you should consider in filtering –
METHODS TO BLOCK SPAM SITES
There are two methods to block such spam sites which will restrict their entry into your website. Thus, if you cut the access, i.e. the first entry point to your account, you will be protected from a spam attack.
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer semalt.com spambot=yes
Order allow, deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spambot
Nevertheless all fake referrers from my GA dashboard are gone.
Block traffic from a single referrer:
RewriteEngine on # Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} badsite\.com [NC] RewriteRule .* – [F]
Block traffic from multiple referrers:
RewriteEngine on # Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} badsite\.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} anotherbadsite\.com RewriteRule .* – [F]
For complete tutorial, visit Comprehensive guide to .htaccess- Blocking users/ sites by referrer
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