Referral spam

[Peter Knight]

I've been reading up on Referral spam in Google Analytics and wondered what others were doing to counter it. It's such a new problem that Google themselves have so far failed to deal with it effectively leaving us web developers to figure out solutions.

Some of the guys on the forums are using .htaccess tweaks to block the domains in question etc.

What (if anything) are you doing?

I saw a WordPress plugin which I think is a good idea. It pulls in a central repository of known referral spammers and blocks them.

Might be a good idea for a PW Module?

[Peter Knight]

Did some further reading. Google have confirmed they are working on a global solution. Launch TBD

[bernhard]

the only one that also works on historical data and my recommendation: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/9739-google-analytics-referral-spam/?p=94480

[cstevensjr]

FYI, PIWIK's take on this:

http://piwik.org/blog/2015/05/stopping-referrer-spam/

https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/5099

[Nico Knoll]

Here is PIWIK's blacklist: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist/master/spammers.txt

[diogo]

Google is taking too long to fix this. I'm trying Yandex metrica with success for now https://metrica.yandex.com/