Posted: October 28th, 2025

How to Avoid the Trap of Referral Spam

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Once you have Google Analytics up and running on your website, it’s a good, free tool for all kinds of useful data and metrics about your website visitors. There is a bit of a learning curve for understanding how to view the Analytics, but once you get past that hurdle, you can usually quickly check in to see some key stats.

One of those key stats is Traffic Acquisition: session source / medium.

The biggest reason to check this often (I recommend at least once a month), is to see where traffic is coming from to get to your website. Typically, the #1 “source” will be (direct) / (none). This is kind of a catch all “bucket” that Google puts any visits that couldn’t be tracked, including people typing your URL directly into their browser bar (other reasons can be email links, links from PDF files, links from bookmarks, links from a payment gateway such as PayPal, etc.)

Sometimes the next line may be google / organic. It’s great if this is the case because it means people are finding your site in organic Google searches.

Beyond that, it starts to list all the other sources such as social media platforms and other sites where your link might be (what’s known as a “backlink”).

So here’s where Referral Spam usually shows up. Sadly, it’s a common issue in Google Analytics. In the screenshot below in the light red highlighting, you’ll see a url / referral (I don’t want to type it out and give them even more traffic!).

a traffic acquisition session source medium screenshot from Google Analytics

The URL actually forwards to a very slick website that promises to get you thousands of geo targeted “organic” traffic. This is not legit traffic, so don’t be fooled if you stumble on a site like this.

What’s super annoying and frankly really sus business practices is that some companies use this tactic to basically scam you into useless services they’re selling, such as “get thousands of geo targeted traffic to your site”.

The important thing to remember is these are FAKE referrals injected into your analytics data. They are NOT real site visitors. This is basically advertising spam.

Odds are, if you don’t recognize the site name as a well-known site or a site you KNOW you’ve got a link to your website on, it’s likely spam.

They can be safely ignored, but they inflate your Google Analytics.

A couple of things NOT to do:

  • If you’ve already visited their site, don’t visit it again.
  • Don’t try to contact them to remove your URL – there’s nothing to remove; they’re not actually linking to you.

How do they get your analytics data?

Usually it’s just scraping website code for Google Analytics IDs (GTAG). But some have random ID generators as well or use lists they get from scammers that have actual IDs on them.

So the whole scheme is basically this:

  1. They get your tracking ID (from your source code or by compiling randomly generated tracking IDs that turn out to be real)
  2. They send fake referral data to Google Analytics using your ID
  3. You see their domain in your reports
  4. You get curious and visit their site
  5. They get real traffic and potential customers

TBH, I really loathe stuff like this, which is why I do my best to shine a light on it. There is zero value to your business by paying a company that claims to get you traffic to your site (even if they claim it’s “geo targeted”), or worse, backlinks, which has the potential to ding your overall SEO read my post about that here.

Is there anything that can be done about this?

You’re not going to get penalized at all for referral spam like this, so that’s the good news. But like I mentioned, it can mess up the accuracy of your Analytics when it comes to referrals. So there is a way in Google Analytics (GA4) to block it, but it will need to be updated each time you catch more of it.

Setting up “Unwanted Referrals” in GA4:

  1. Go to Admin by clicking on the gear icon in the bottom left corner of the screen/li>
  2. Click on Data Collection and Modification and then click on Data Streams/li>
  3. On the next screen, click on your web data stream/li>
  4. Scroll down and click Configure tag settings/li>
  5. Click on the “Show More”/li>
  6. Click on List unwanted referrals/li>
  7. Choose the “referral domain contains” selection (should be the default) and add the spammy URL (just the URL, you don’t have to put in https://)/li>
  8. Hit Save (in the top right of the screen)/li>
  9. Repeat this process when you find more/li>

This would essentially be a “best practice” move to ensure that your Google Analytics data is as accurate as it can be.

A photo of Sherry Holub leaning on the railing of some wooden steps in front of a large holly bush

Sherry Holub

I'm a creative problem-solver driven by the desire to see small businesses improve their image and succeed. I've got almost 30 years experience and have worked with clients as large as Nike and as small as the local farm down the road from me. I've been an advocate for education, a member of prestigious design organizations, won awards, and been invited to judge design competitions such as the Webbys. Over the years, I have also written blogs and articles for a number of online sites and print publications. I have a heavy background in art, photography, graphic design and thinking outside the box.

When not working, you'll find me getting outdoors, taking trips in my teardrop trailer ("The Gnome Home"), practicing Qi Gong, hitting the gym, snowboarding, keeping my cats entertained, driving around in a sweet 1970 Camaro and generally trying to live my best life.

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