Sorry for the language. However, I run a handful of small, fairly low traffic sites. This one, my product management site, one for my dog(s) and their exploits, and my Wife’s professional site.
All of these use WordPress, and I have Google analytics set up to track and monitor them.
As I mentioned, they are low traffic, where 3-5 visits a day is considered “good”. All good so far. However, there are often spikes of visits, and page loads on the Google Analytics page, that aren’t reflected in actual visitors (that I also track via the WordPress account and Jetpack).
This is the dreaded “referrer spam”, SEO manipulation that remains surprisingly resilient, that is link pumping sites that build search rankings by having a lot of links to their site that are ghosted (as in, not really existent) on other sites. This “ghost” traffic referrals help lift their stats, and thus visibility.
If you have sites “referring” traffic from domains like:
- 4webmasters.com
- trafficmonetize.com
- earnity-money.com
and literally shit-loads more, you are the victim of referrer spam.
The only way to swat at this is to look at your Analytics and when you see an uncharacteristic spike in traffic, look in “Source Medium” in the acquisition panel, and add the domains of the shit-bags who do referrer spam to your exclude filters.
It is a royal pain in the ass, and you would think that Google could fucking automate this, but I strongly suspect that they quietly endorse this bullshit manipulation of their algorithms.
If I ever run into someone who does this referrer bullshit, I will deck them. They are miserable pieces of human garbage.
