Great news at last that my website traffic is dropping! What I hear you cry! You see the problem I and many webmasters have encountered recently (and not so recently) is inaccurate analytics information. Spammers had cleverly added links to website analytics in the hope that webmaster and website owners would click on the links to see who was adding links to their websites. This is termed as ‘Referral SPAM’ and it was a real pain in the proverbial. Yes it made it look like websites were performing well but in fact it was not real traffic. Google have finally managed to sort the ongoing SPAM referral problem.
What is SPAM Referral traffic?
Spam Referral traffic are links in analytics that gains traffic by hoping that the website owners and webmasters will click on those referral sites in order to see what it was that brought visitors to their website. These are often from worldwide sites such as Russia and Brazil. While no links – or ‘real traffic’ – came from these sites. Up to now Google Analytics wasn’t able to tell what was referral spam and what was legitimate links but it now appears Google have cracked the problem.
Google Has Started To Sanitize The Links
Website owners will be able to analyze their dashboard without all the ‘referral spam’ skewing the figures. This may result in your website looking like traffic is dropping but seeing as it isn’t real traffic it is great news as you can now concentrate on the real factors and see genuine traffic.
The changes have are now being seen on many websites, I am sure there will be many people panicking at seeing a downward trendline, particularly as it doesn’t seem the changes Google have put in place are historically being removed. Going forward the Google analytics will be much more accurate.
You can check to see your traffic sources by going into google analytics >>Acquisition >>All Traffic >> Channels then compare January to March .. you will probably see some dodgy looking sites showing in January which hopefully have dissapeared in the more recent weeks
