: Excluding Google Analytics spam by referral I've been reading up on how to filter out spam from Google Analytics. In this case, I'm trying to filter out the spam that shows up under referrals.

@LarsenBagley505

Myself, I have been completely blocking domains, IP ranges and even whole countries right in my .htaccess file. For instance:

Domain Referrers

# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ranksonic.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} emailmarketingrobot.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} monetizationking.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} compliance-checker.info [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} 1-99seo.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} seoanalyses.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]


IP Ranges

# Deny from 184.72.64.0/18 (184.72.64.0 - 184.72.127.255)


Countries

<Files *>
order deny,allow
###
# Russia (RU), Ukraine (UA), Belarus (BY), Bulgaria (BG), Czech Republic(CZ), Romania (RO), Latvia (LV), Estonia (EE), Kazakstan (KZ), Moldavia/Moldova (MD), Poland (PL), Serbia (RS), Siberia, Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SL)
# deny from 2.72.0.0/13 2.92.0.0/14 2.132.0.0/14 5.1.0.0/19 5.8.36.0/22 5.16.0.0/14 5.34.56.0/22


It's amazing how much your bounce rate goes down when you block all of your spammy referrers and hacking attempts from all of the notorious hacker countries...

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@Si4351233

Are you filtering by campaign source? Also, are those all of the spam domains that you're seeing in your referral traffic? Most of the regex I've seen for this is considerably longer and more inclusive.

Don't forget to include a hostname filter as well to help with ghost spam. I also recommend filtering out your internal IPs for good measure.

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