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From every example on the net it seems this is the config to use to block referrer spam. I am still getting traffic from trafficmonetize.org. Can anyone tell me or give me some ideas what to look for.

## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} best-seo-offer\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} 100dollars-seo\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-your-website\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} seoanalyses\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} 4webmasters\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} trafficmonetize\.org [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Cesar Bielich
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2 Answers2

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I spent a week dealing with referral bots spamming sites. The first line defense was doing it via the htaccess file, however bots where still able to get through and hitting my Google Analytics account.

The reason some of these bots are hitting your site is because they are in fact not actually visiting your website. They are taking your Google Analytics tracker code, and placing it within a JavaScript on their servers and pinging it which is causing false pageviews.

The best solution that I came up with, was simply filtering them out in my Google Analytics account. Here is the Moz article that I used as a reference. Since adding the filter, the bots no longer appear in my Analytics stats.

Geoffrey
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Server solutions like the .htaccess file will only work for Crawler spam, from your list

  • semalt
  • 100dollars-seo
  • buttons-for-website
  • buttons-for-your-website

Ghost spam like 4webmasters and trafficmonetize never access your site, so there is no point on trying to block it from the .htaccess file, it all happens within GA so has to be filtered out there, that's why it keeps showing on your reports.

As for seoanalyses I'm not sure since I haven't seen it on any of the properties I manage, but you can see it for yourself, select as a second dimension hostname and if you see a fake hostname or not set then is ghost spam, if it has a valid hostname then is crawler. Either way you can filter it.

You can use 2 approaches for filtering spam, one is creating a Campaign Source excluding the referral or a more advanced approach is to create a Valid hostname filter that will get rid of all Ghost Spam

Here you can find more information about the spam and both solutions:

Community
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Carlos Escalera Alonso
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