You can’t have a successful SEO strategy without the proper analytics to back it up! Website analytics are the backbone of your business’s SEO work, as they provide the blueprint from where you can adjust your strategy. However, this doesn’t mean that analytics are foolproof! Spam traffic and bots have the potential to screw with your website’s data and throw your analytics off balance. How can you deter this traffic and prevent it from affecting your referral analytics? We explain some proven ways below!
Use An .htaccess File
Did you know that there’s a file you can use as an effective firewall against spam traffic? Those that have dealt with spam traffic before have likely heard of this file. The purpose of an .htaccess file is to help change the way your website behaves. You can control a number of different things using this file, and one of those things is who can access your website. Most spam traffic will come from a singular IP address – which you can figure out using Google Analytics – and you can punch in this address to prevent this spam traffic from showing up.
Using A Honeypot
If you’re operating a website that runs primarily through WordPress, you’re in luck! One of the trickiest things to prevent with spam traffic is spam-related contact forms. Even if you think you’ve done everything, they’ll still find a way to break through the cracks. Adding a reCaptcha to your contact form can be good, but not a foolproof solution. Adding a honeypot will add even more depth to your security. The honeypot places an unanswerable prompt in front of any spam bots trying to submit contact forms, acting as a huge deterrent for them.
Using cPanel
If you use cPanel to help run your website’s hosting and backend files, you can actually use it in tandem with Google Analytics to deter spam traffic! How you would do so here is similar to how you would program an .htaccess file. You can check the IP address of where the referral spam is coming from using Analytics, then plug in the necessary IP addresses into cPanel. It would then block any traffic coming from those IP addresses, which would help to make this traffic decrease.
SEO Strategies With Boston Web Marketing
Having an SEO strategy means having to balance a lot of moving parts. Boston Web Marketing can help you get a handle on all of them with our years of experience helping clients move up the search result rankings. We’ll give your business the rankings to get found quickly and the conversions it needs to thrive. To reap the benefits for your website, click here to contact us directly!