Week 11: Understanding Referral Spam

Referral spam is fake success that is supposed to make your website look more appealing or legitimate to visitors. How does it happen? Typically the person conducting this spam will make a ton of website requests using a fake referral URL to bring "more traffic" to the desired website. This is definitely something to protect yourself from just in case you are caught in the eyes of a spammer. Here are a few solutions:

• Password protected areas (non-public) 
• Robot Exclusion 
• Nofollow value to links
• Blacklist IP
• Other filters/blocks

The last thing a site owner needs is to lose credibility due to referral spam. This is in fact a perfect example on how google analytics or site statistics can be polluted. Make sure you take the precautions necessary to protect your content and allow yourself to see true progress! Similarly to referral spam, there is also other forms of spam. Bot spam can be dangerous as well because these bots are designed to gather information from websites, social media, emails etc. It is very important to watch your site traffic as this activity can be noticed quickly. Below is a great view of what referral spam may look like.