Referral Spam (trafficmonetize.org, 4webmasters.org, etc)

[Digalign]

So, we've been plagued with pretty much ALL of our clients from traffic from spammy websites, and even a porn site or two.

Here are a few examples:

• 4webmasters
• Floatingsharebuttons
• Trafficmonetize.org
• 100dollarseo

We are seeing our websites negatively impacted by this.

How could this be happening?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

This sometimes just happens. Here are a couple of resources to help you clear this up in GA reporting and also how to block these spam bots altogether:
How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data (Moz)
Stop Ghost Spam in Google Analytics (Marcel Digital)

Both provide tips for you and your web development team!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[TimHolmes]

I would recommend following Carlos Escalera comment on referral filters. I followed his process about a month back when I noticed ever increasing volumes of referral spam hitting our site.

His recent comment found here will give you an overview or you can follow the entire process on this article.

It worked a treat for me utilising both .htaccess to restrict spam crawlers and GA filters to clean up my traffic data.

http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

[Digalign]

We had a client of ours get blacklisted because of porn links and this referral traffic. Could it have been done by a disgruntled employee? How do these things start?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

There's really no way of telling without a link to your client's site.

Here's a great Q+A on StackExchange where users offer their ideas. Including...

They find new sites by:

• Crawling and looking for signatures of known software. Usually this is a snippet of text like a copyright or a meta tag but it could be any consistent identifier. This usually applies to blog and forum software.
• Manual inclusion. Human beings, whose labor is cheap in many parts of the world, look for known software or forms that are easily exploitable and add them to a database. This usually applies to custom registration and contact forms.
• They buy lists. Just like email addresses are sold by spammers, known vulnerable or preferred target site lists are sold as well.

So, it really could be a lot of things, but I wouldn't jump to inclusions. Just refer the resources above and start doing what you can!

Hope this helps a bit - good luck!