simple-share-buttons.com<\/em><\/p>\n buttons-for-website.com<\/em><\/p>\n If you’ve ever taken a look at analytics for your website, you’ll have seen sites like these\u00a0inside the referral traffic category. What are these sites? Are they real people? Should I be concerned about hackers? Why are they visiting my site? Should I do something about it?<\/p>\n Spam bots are out there. They crawl your site for many reasons. Some are good, some not. Google has its own spam bot, for example. But many are simply spam, unnecessary, and potentially aggravating for website managers who want “clean” reports free from numbers that may dilute actual data in reports from Google Analytics, or other website analytics. And though they won’t typically hack your site, they make reports inaccurate, and ultimately undermine consistency for businesses who are tracking their success online.<\/p>\n The first step to knowing if a referrer is spam or not is to visit the url for yourself. If you quickly recognize it, great! Referral traffic is a fantastic way to earn quality traffic from other websites. Referral traffic is very positive, and many business make a living from earning ROI from referrers. But, the problem is knowing the real story. Is it\u00a0spam or not?<\/em><\/p>\n If you don’t recognize the site, move to the next step.<\/p>\n We’ve already included several known spam sites at the top of this post. semalt.com, and simple-share-buttons.com<\/em> are well known spammers. Sometimes you can quickly identify a spam site\u00a0by simply googling the url. You’ll notice immediately others have identified many spam sites.<\/p>\n If you still don’t know, and can’t find\u00a0proof, move to the next step.<\/p>\n This is a bit more technical, if you’re\u00a0an analytics\u00a0beginner. What you’re essentially looking for is what word or phrase was used to hyperlink to your site. This often reveals spam sites. If the keyword or phrase linked to your site is\u00a0completely irrelevant to your site content, the referrer is spam.<\/p>\n For example, let’s use the example of an online pottery business.\u00a0The pottery website would\u00a0expect to find referring traffic linked in an anchor text like “pottery” or “check out this great pottery site”.\u00a0In this case, the keyword “pottery” is linked. It’s likely in this scenario the site isn’t spam. If, however, the keyword is something like “kate middleton pics”, you can bet it’s a spam site (NOTE: We’ve seen that exact keyword phrased linked to sites we manage).<\/p>\nSpam Bots<\/h2>\n
![\"Spam](\"https:\/\/expio.marketing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Expio-Social-Post.jpg\")
<\/p>\n4 Steps: Clean Spam\u00a0Up and Build on\u00a0Quality Referral Traffic<\/h2>\n
Do you recognize the site?<\/h3>\n
Do a quick search for common spam sites<\/h3>\n
Use Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) to explore link anchor tags<\/h3>\n
![\"Click](\"https:\/\/expio.marketing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Find-External-Links-Using-Google-Search-Console.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Using](\"https:\/\/expio.marketing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/search-console-screenshot.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCreate a filter in Google Analytics<\/h3>\n