Analytics spam is not a new issue, but most recently it has become far more dangerous than ever. Here the leading expert from Semalt Lisa Mitchell, is going to explain some ways of blocking and removing Google Analytics spam. You would also get an idea of how they impact your sites.

The first thing you would have to know is that analytics spam comes in different forms: ghost spam and bot spam. Both of these forms impact your Google Analytics to a great extent. Therefore, the way to deal with them should be different, and your focus should be on how to remove them by the whole.
What is Bot Spam?

Bot traffic or bot spam is more common and dangerous than you would ever expect. In recent months, it has infected more than two billion websites due to low-quality traffic. Not all of the bots are dangerous or bad, though. Google, Bing, and other big
search engines depend on the search bots when it comes to crawling and indexing the content on the websites. The commercial crawlers such as SEMrush, Pinterest, feed fetchers such as FeedBurner, Twitter, as well as and monitoring bots such as WordPress, Uptime Robot, are all good to go with. But you should do your best to get rid of spam bots that tend to ruin your site to a great extent.

Spam bots or crawler spam are the programs that are designed to automate different tasks, such as stealing your content and data, server jacking, spamming of comments, phishing attacks, and DDoS attacks. They fall into different categories, such as hacking tools, impersonators, spammers, and scrapers. Impersonators are those that use false identities to bypass your security measures. They are used to deploy DDoS attacks. The second type is the hacking tool, which is used for distributing different malware and viruses. Two years ago, Google claimed that 200 percent websites were hacked due to this issue. Scrapers are widely used for stealing web content and data. In most cases, the stolen articles are republished on other domains and forums. Spammers make use of bots to spread promotional content in the form of phishing links and comments.

There are different ways to block and remove bots and spam. Some of them have been discussed below.
Automatic Bot/Spider Filtering Feature

This feature was introduced by Google a few months ago. It lets you check and block the traffic that is coming from unknown IP addresses. You can easily get rid of spiders and bots with this type. You can create filters on the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots lists. The auto-filters is the most powerful defense against bot spam as various sites have been benefited from it already. It is easy to implement and gives you excellent results.
Block Bots Using .htaccess

Another way is to block bots using .htaccess files. This auto filter feature helps remove the bots visits your Google Analytics. It prevents the arrival of bots, but it cannot be a permanent solution for your website. If you have any confusion or questions about the solutions provided here, you may get in touch with us through the comment section below.