Google Analytics and the Dreaded Referral Spam

While reviewing a clients analytics, we came across some usual referral urls. Strange websites like buttons\-for\-websites.com. How is this website linking to our site? It’s not. The referral is a ghost referral spam in Google Analytics. Users don’t actually visit our site from these spam sites and our traffic stats become skewed and almost useless.

So, what to do about all this?

We need to filter these spammy sites out of our data! We can do this many ways, and there are many sites out there that give detailed step by step instructions. Our clients are now referral spam free in their reporting statistics.