I’m testing out a plugin on a WordPress site to prevent referral traffic. The default setting is a redirect to google.com. I can override this and display a 403 error instead.
Do you see any advantage with one over the other?
Blocking Spam referral traffic – better to redirect or throw up a 403 error?
From what I have read when researching how to deal with this issue, most of the referral ‘spam’ you are getting in google analytics doesn’t actually come from hits to your site, but instead it is done by spammers exploiting google’s analytics code, by using random tracking IDs, and they up end up using your ID too.
Having said that, I don’t think a wordpress plugin can do anything to prevent that kind of spam as they don’t ever reach your site, and I believe the vast majority of referral/analytics spam being done currently is using the method mentioned above.
So the best way to get rid (or at least largely reduce the amount) of referral spam you’re getting is to set filters within your google analytics dashboard. Even the methods for that are constantly changing, as google keeps improving that service, but here’s two fairly recent articles that may help you configure those:
https://www.distilled.net/resources/quick-fix-for-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
http://www.shivarweb.com/4635/filter-analytics-spam/