How to Exclude Spam Bots from Your Analytics Referral Data
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2015 3:27 amThere are two main reasons why we should block spam bots from the referral data.
First: corrupt analytics data. A few hundred hits a month on a site like Moz.com isn’t going to move the needle when compared to the sheer volume of sessions they have daily. However, on a small site for a local plumber, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic and making marketing analysis a frustrating endeavor.
Second: server load and security. The spam bots visits are using our server resources for something that we don’t want or need. An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. On top of that, who knows what else they’re doing on our site while they’re there. They could easily be looking for WordPress, plugin and server vulnerabilities.
See how you can solve this issue: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bo ... erral-data
First: corrupt analytics data. A few hundred hits a month on a site like Moz.com isn’t going to move the needle when compared to the sheer volume of sessions they have daily. However, on a small site for a local plumber, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic and making marketing analysis a frustrating endeavor.
Second: server load and security. The spam bots visits are using our server resources for something that we don’t want or need. An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. On top of that, who knows what else they’re doing on our site while they’re there. They could easily be looking for WordPress, plugin and server vulnerabilities.
See how you can solve this issue: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bo ... erral-data