google spam

Chances are if you’ve been regularly checking your medical or aesthetic practice’s Google Analytics that you’ve come across some strange referral sources. You might see Facebook, Twitter, Real Self, or possibly another directory you’re listed on. However, you may see sources such as:

  • semalt.com
  • social-buttons.com
  • buttons-for-website.com

weird referral sources

What are these referral sources?

Semalt claims they are “a professional webmaster analytics tool that opens the door to new opportunities for the market monitoring, yours and your competitors’ positions tracking and comprehensible analytics business information.”

Semalt appears to be crawling massive amounts of websites and web pages in order to show up in your reports so that you’ll then say “hey, who is Semalt?” and go to their website. Their call to action on their website is for the user to enter your domain for a free analysis. It’s a sneaky tactic that many would consider to “referral spam.”

Similarly, social-buttons.com and buttons-for-website.com utilize spam bots that are also trying to drive traffic to their website by crawling your site.

How to get rid of these sources?

Obviously, having these sites in your analytics reports skews the data. Furthermore, if you get enough of this spam traffic it may affect your site’s bandwidth, and ultimately, speed.

To remove these sources from all future analtyics reports click on “Admin” in the top navigation bar. Then, under the ‘Account’ column click ‘All Filters’.

filters

Next, name your filter and set the predefined filters to exclude traffic from the domain you want excluded, like the example below.

filter2

In some instances you may not be able to access the links under the Account column (if you don’t have master access). In this case, simply go to the View column on the far right of your Admin page. Then click the first link ‘View Settings’. From there, you’ll simply need to check the ‘Bot Filtering’ box.

bot filtering

Would you like to learn more about using Google Analytics? Check out our collection of articles about using analytics to analyze your marketing efforts. If you’d like to learn more about how you can imporove your digital marketing then drop TRBO a line here or call us directly at 877-673-7096 x2.

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