Google Analytic Spam Blocking

RapidWeaver Classic
1

I have a website for a non-profit in Cambodia and use Google Analytics to provide the missionaries location information on the site visits. The site doesn’t normally experience a lot of traffic, but I noticed that there were quite a few visits both yesterday and today from numerous countries with referrals from “resell-seo-services.com” and “auto-seo-services.com”, When I Googled this it appears that it is related to a spam bot. I wanted to ask if this is something I should worry about, just ignore, block or remove Google Analytics and use something else.

I did find an online article (https://carloseo.com/how-to-block-unwanted-crawlers-from-accessing-your-site/) that suggested adding this in the htaccess file:

## STOP Semalt.com Crawler Spam
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} uptime\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} top1\-seo\-service\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} free\-video\-tool\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} responsive\-test\.net [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywords\-monitoring\-your\-success\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

I assume all I need to do to block this spam is add or replace the referrals noted above (using the backslash) in the suggest code for the htaccess file.

Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction.

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These things only affect your google analytics, they are basically trying to get the analytics user to click on them and see what they are.

They do however mess up your analytics traffic stats there are tools in analytics to filter stuff like this out of the results but IMO Google needs to find a way to put a stop to this kind of thing.

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Honestly there’s all kinds of htaccess list you can add to your site and still not come close to blocking all the bad bots out there.

Over Half of web traffic is non-human according to a report from statista

And we thought the world was going mobile.

Most of these bots are difficult to detect and block as nowadays they camouflage them selves by changing names and using proxy servers.

Every rule you add to your htaccess file does impact performance, and most of these lists get outdated quickly.

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