So over 90% of my visitors were Referral spammers

I thought my site was pretty well visited. Well, guess again :(

I started noticing something strange in the ‘Behavior Flow’ in Google Analytics (GA). All my visitors stayed on http://www.theozwinderman.nl/, for about 5 minutes and then left. Very strange, because on www.theozwinderman.nl/ there is only an index.php that immediately redirects to /newsite/index.php (a pretty strange setup I came up with 8 years ago).

So something was off!

After some more digging, I found out that most of the traffic came from ‘Macintosh’ users with a Google Chrome version at 40.0.2214.111 And these users were not from the Netherlands (as ’normal’ visitors would be, as it is a Dutch site), but rather the US or China. With this version-number I did some googling, and found out that this is referer spam.

Sure enough, the referal-section of GA was overflowing with source sites as get-some-more-traffic-to-your-website.com (eventhough that’s a fake url, don’t click it). Unbelievably stupid.

Anyway, I created my own ‘Segment’ in GA to get rid of this bullshit. I filter on a combination of the Chrome-version, the page-title (these spammers usually give up ‘home page’ instead of the real page title) and then some keywords in source like ‘seo’ or ‘buttons’.

Now only about 13% of my visitors remain…

Segment I use to filter spam: #

• Filter out traffic not using a logical page title (every page on my website includes ‘Zwinderman’)
• Filter out traffic using Chrome 40.0.2214.111
• Filter out remaining traffic with a source containing ‘seo’ or ‘buttons’