How to stop spam referrals and filter them from Google Analytics (Using htaccess)

Many of us have seen spikes in traffic report from Google Analytics. These spikes bring joy to our minds and when we drill down the traffic we get disappointed because it is from a spam referral. In this article I will be explaining you how to combat spam referral.

Spam Referrals causes incorrect traffic analysis we all know, but major impact they leave over your web bandwidth. If your web site is running on VPS or Shared server, your bandwidth is important and needs to be preserved for real traffic. If your maximum bandwidth is eaten by spam referrals your real users may get “Busy Server” Response.

To Combat referral spams, you can implement following solutions,

1. Modify htaccess file block spam referrals.
2. Filter Traffic statistics from Google Analytics

Filtering traffic from Google Analytics is very easy and you can do it from the admin tab in your Analytics account. I personally don’t recommend filtering this because filters will just remove it from your traffic report but these referrals will continue to consume resources behind the scenes.

I found block them via htaccess is most effective way. Follow below steps to block them through Htaccess –

1) Go to Analytics account and note down referral domains that you think are spam.

2) In your htaccess file, use %{HTTP_REFERER} to get the referrer and verify if these referrers contains words which are same as from referral bots you got from step 1 –

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (priceg) [NC,OR]

3) if you have more than one spam create a list of RewiteCond –

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (priceg) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (darodar) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (hulfingtonpost) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (simple-share-buttons) [NC]

here we have asked Apache to look for referrers containing words from this list.

4) Now that we have caught the spam referral, lets throw it out and show them forbidden message.

RewriteRule .* – [F]

This code will block the page and spam bot will receive Error 403 like this

Here is how the whole code looks –

# Handle Spam bots
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (priceg) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (darodar) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (hulfingtonpost) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (simple-share-buttons) [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

We have seen almost 4% savings in bandwidth each month after implementing it. Below is the final code you need to put in .htaccess with list of domains I know and should be blocked, let me know if you have seen domains other than these –

# Handle Spam bots
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (priceg) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (darodar) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (hulfingtonpost) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (ilovevitaly) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (buy-cheap-online) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (free-share-buttons) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (4webmasters) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (theguardlan) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (semalt) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (buttons-for-website) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (see-your-website-here) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (googlsucks) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (guardlink) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (Get-Free-Traffic-Now) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (event-tracking) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (free-share-buttons) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (simple-share-buttons) [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

Hope this article was helpful. Please feel free to leave your comment below.

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