Clean Out Your Referrer Traffic

If you have a collection of websites that you manage, it is really just a matter of time before you get spammed by bots, scrapers, and dodgy URL shortners. Most of these poorly built spam bots will make some badly coded requests that will trigger your Google Analytics code. This then fills your referral traffic reports with redundant numbers if you do not take one of 2 options:

• Block the requests from the domain/IP address via the htaccess file
• Filter them out of your Google Analytics reports

This morning I spent the last 40min blocking domains and IPs because I feel it is the best way to tackle it. Reasons being:

• Filtering dud traffic out of reports is the server request equivalent of out-of-sight-out-of-mind
• If you block it at domain level, you are covered if they change their IP address regularly or the domain changes hands and moves to another server.
• I like just serving 403 status codes to people – makes me feel tough

Sure it was time consuming and I will never win the war, but at least now both my server and my Google Analytics reports love me that little bit more.

If anyone knows of a tool where you feed it a list of referring URLs and grabs the IP and can tell if it is part of a spam/traffic-faking network can you please, please, please let me know in the comments!

Happy 403ing!