Customers are calling to say they are seeing strange traffic in Google Analytics, sometimes lots of referrals and hits from companies they've never heard of and that shouldn't have a reason to be referring sites to them, such as: semalt.com, buttons-for-website.com, darodar.com, see-your-website-here.com, and others.
There are several steps you can take to get these spam bots off of your Analytics reports, including setting up exclusions and editing your HTaccess file (don't touch that unless you know exactly what you are doing - one wrong character and your site is down) but today I am going to show you one very easy step to take.
Google has allowed for Bot and Spider filtering. First, log in to Google Analytics.
1- Click "Admin" at the top of the page
2- Click "View Settings" under the View (third from left) column
3- You are now in "Reporting View Settings" Scroll down a bit to find "Bot Filtering"
4- Click the box next to "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders", then click the blue "Save" button
This is not a retroactive solution. You will still see the old bot hits, but going forward, they will not show up in your referrals or hits.
Annie Buck
Local, Social Media and Education Support
Acorn IS
