Table of contents
INTRODUCTION ABOUT SPAM, ROBOTS AND CAPTCHA TRAFFIC
First an introduction before talking about spam traffic, ghost, robots or captcha, in which we put you in background about all this so that you do not find it out of the blue.
We live in the era of big data, of data on absolutely everything and of business strategies based, more than ever, on statistics. Over the years, society, which we all share, has been evolving in its habits, both vital and consumer, and companies, most of them more motivated by the need to jump on a train that society had already jumped on than by a genuine desire to innovate, have had no choice but to adapt to all these ways of working and optimize their way of doing it to match it.
TRAFFIC AND WEB ANALYTICS
That is why, from a few years ago until today, web analytics and the interpretation of the data obtained from it, have become a basic pillar of the strategy of an Internet business, whether it is an online store or any other type of ecommerce. Basically it is our yardstick to know if we are doing well in our work as marketers.
If we manage to attract enough traffic, and this, in addition, behaves the way we want, it means that what we are doing is giving good results and we are on the right track, however, if on the contrary we observe that we have little traffic and that it does not convert at all, this makes it clear that we have to change strategy, because it is not working.
To achieve remarkable changes in the traffic of an online store is not something that happens quickly, usually things take time and it is necessary to wait to get results, so if suddenly, your web traffic grows unexpectedly, before you start to open the champagne and feel like Leonardo Dicaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street, it is better to make sure what kind of traffic it is, because surely, it will be spam traffic, which is not good for you, much less something to celebrate.
SPAM TRAFFIC IS NO GOOD
Unlike social networks, where spam profiles “fatten” the accounts and give the appearance that we have more followers (so do not bother so much), in the world “web traffic”, spam is useless, in fact, it is harmful to you, because, unfortunately, spam traffic counts as real visits in Google Analytics, which can falsely fool you into thinking that your business objectives are being met, and in reality, maybe you’re getting a slap and you’re not even aware of it. Or, even worse, maybe they are using your contact forms to spam their stuff through your own server.
Think that, even if you get a lot of traffic, if it doesn’t convert, it doesn’t even serve to feed your ego, like social media, because no one but you (and your team) has access to that analytics data. On the other hand, if you let a lot of spam into your website, it’s like a dam break: it starts with a trickle through a few small cracks, and if you do nothing to stop it, these spammers will start a “torrent of water” that can end up introducing malware into your site and your server. This spam traffic can compromise the security of your server by saturating it, which can slow down your website, cause it to crash or even cause the hosting company to penalize you.
And the worst thing is not that, that after all the main impediment for you is that they are falsifying your traffic data, the worst thing is when they start to take out their “little robots” and start spamming the contact forms that you have in your online store, but this is easily solved with a captcha. Well I’m getting ahead of myself, keep reading. From what I explain to you, you will see that there is little joke with spam traffic.
hOW TO FIGHT SPAM TRAFFIC?
DETECT IT
Before you start deleting, captchaing and installing modules, what you have to do is to detect that spam traffic. Why are people spamming your business to begin with, and why are some people sending spam traffic to you in particular?
The main reason these sites spam you is because they are looking for feedback, even if it is in trace amounts (that’s why they have to do it to tens of thousands of pages), between your site and theirs, since they know that a percentage of the traffic from your online store ends up coming back to their site. There they have ads, subscription pages to get leads, more spam, even malware… That is, for them, sending you spam traffic is a traffic acquisition strategy, it is not that they have chosen you for a complicated conspiracy, you simply match in their search patterns with terms they use, or you have a high rate of traffic that they want to take advantage of.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS OUR ALLY TO DETECT SPAM REFERRALS
To find these pages that try to take advantage of us, we must enter our Google Analytics, in the acquisition section and, from there, click on “Overview”. Here you will see the number of visits you have and the channels through which they reach you. Next, you have to click on “Referral” which, in case you don’t know, is the traffic that comes to you from other pages that mention you. This is where you have to discriminate those that are real mentions, from people who have mentioned you in a blog or in a specific section of their website for some reason, from what is simple spam. Be wary of domain names such as: guardlink.org, event-tracking.com, best-eso-offer.com, www4.free.social-buttons.com, site4.free-share-buttons.com, cpac.es… because they are spam traffic.
It would be complicated to detail a complete list of web domains that are catalogued as spam, since they keep changing them and creating new ones, discarding those that are already very marked, making spelling variations… in the end we could fill dozens of pages with urls, and we would never finish. Fortunately, there is a database, https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx where by typing the domain you suspect, it will quickly inform us if it is in any list of malicious domains.
Anyway, use common sense, as long as there are domains that send you traffic that meets the following characteristics, you can be sure that it is spam:
- It has a bounce rate of almost 100%
- Does not convert
- Does not interact with your Web site or, what is worse, is using your contact forms in a massive way that saturates your server
ELIMINATE SPAM TRAFFIC
for all the above mentioned, the most obvious solution regarding what to do with spam traffic is to eliminate it. We have to get rid of all that “trash” and prevent them from using us to maliciously increase their own domains, so the most recommended option to remove it from your website is to block these domains as you detect them, and you have to do it in a file on your server called .htaccess.
We recommend, however, that you only do this yourself if you have knowledge of the subject, and, if not, for God’s sake, that a programmer supervises it at all times or that he/she does it directly, since this file links your page with the server and any slightest failure in the code can mean a very messy mess that can bring down your store.
Now what you have to do is to check one by one the links you have in your referral channel to make sure they are spam, remember that not all the links that appear there must necessarily be spam, as there may be clients of yours or blogs that have linked to you, or even that you have a marketing strategy based on links to other websites, so you should not block everything you see there.
You have to discriminate and make a list of web spammers in an excel (or in the program of your choice) and add there, one by one, each spam domain you detect. Keep it in alphabetical order, because if in the future you want to add a new spamer, it will be much easier to review your list and see if you already have it.
This is a never-ending job, as spammers are constantly creating new domains, and other spammers are appearing on the scene… so this task will become part of your monthly (or even weekly) routine. That’s why it’s important that you organize it well.
USE .HTACCESS TO FIGHT SPAM
Once you have made this list, you must open your server in an FTP Manager, and find your .htaccess document. Open it with notepad, or whatever you use, and then add this code to the end of your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} webdespam.extension [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} laúltimawebspam\.extension [NC]
You have to replace webdespam for each of the spam links in your list, except for the last link you are going to put, since the code is different (the second line). Now, you only have to update your .htaccess document and analyze in the following days if we continue receiving referral visits from these sources. Do not think that by doing this you have already removed a problem, as there are some of these spam referrers that resist this action and, those that you have already blocked, create new subdomains with which to continue spamming you. So, as I say, we must continually pay attention.
ELIMINATING GHOST TRAFFIC
as we said at the beginning, everything has been evolving with the use of the Internet, and while new ways to combat spam were being discovered, spammers were creating new ways to do their thing that bypassed those solutions.
Possibly the worst type of spam you are going to receive in your online store is going to be ghost traffic. Ghost spammers or ghost referrers manipulate your Google Analytics data, making it look like they have never and will never visit your website. Some of the most known are trafficmonetize.org and 4webmasters.org.
Since these referrals do not actually visit our site, there is no point in trying to block them, so in this case, the best thing to do is to create a custom Google Analytics filter to remove spam traffic from our results.
- how to do it? By following these steps
- .Login to the admin part of your Google Analytics and click on “Create new filter”.
- Under Filter Type, select “Custom “
- Check the “Exclude” option.
- Under Filter Field, select “Campaign Source”.
- In the Filter Pattern, type “trafficmonetize.org”.
Click
save remember that you will need to create a filter for each ghost spammer you have.
ELIMINATING SPAM IN CONTACT FORMS: CAPTCHA
we said before that the worst of spam traffic is when those spammers use, in addition, their robots to fill our store with their “crap”. Everyone who has a web form (e.g. contact us, comments, request an appointment, etc) on their website has to deal with the problem of spam message communications. The endless stream of spam in our inbox is already a daily occurrence in any online store.
Spammers use bots that come in looking for web forms to send thousands of “ad” submissions for their products, trying to scrape, again, a few crumbs among a sea of users. So how do we eliminate this annoying spam from our inbox every time they try to get in?
The quick and easy solution: CAPTCHA
cAPTCHA is a text containing the image that the user must read and enter to unlock the submission of web forms. It is something very common and with which we are all familiar, since they have been with us for a few years, and if they continue to be used, it is because it has been proven to be the fastest and easiest way to cut spam in contact forms.
Our brain is programmed to recognize the patterns that come naturally to our mind and to be able to express them in words or orthographic symbols, however, the algorithms used by these bots are unable to do so.
While it is true that it fights spam in a satisfactory way, it is also true that if the CAPTCHA is too complex, in the end not even humans can get it right. That is why it is necessary to have installed a module that provides us with a solution that seeks harmony between the human factor and the machine factor, so we offer you ours, which we developed some time ago, and has proven that it more than fulfills its mission.
contact us if you are interested in putting a good Captcha in your online store and thus avoid that annoying spam in your mailbox. You can buy our Captcha module from the Modules section of our website, you have it available here.
With it you will have the forms protected and only your customers can use them to send information, also, preventing the development of more advanced bots that interpret certain patterns of simple images, if you try several times, will jump an extra protection that forces them to mark areas of an image by answering a question displayed on the screen, something that for the moment, can not do any kind of robot of this kind.
The tricky solution: Modifying the CSS of the form
the method of including a new CSS in your form is also very popular and easy to do. It consists of adding dummy fields that are invisible to anyone viewing the page when we create the form or modify an existing one. Search bots generally do not analyze the entire page and underlying code, but usually only focus on the form itself.
Not realizing that the fields with the input values are invisible, the bots will focus on that, exposing them for what they are and excluding them within the contact form itself. It will only take you a little bit of programming coding work, but overall it is a good spam filtering system.
CONCLUSIONS ABOUT SPAM AND CAPTCHA
spam traffic, of any kind, is your enemy, and it is, mainly for two reasons:
- It takes advantage of you. Using your domain and your contact forms to spalera left and right, carrying you with the consequences of these actions and being your domain registered as a spam generator.
- It dirties, slows down and spoils your online store. You have worked too hard on your ecommerce for a smart guy to come along and make it slower and dirtier with all the spam he wants to send through it.
You have no choice but to fight it and, above all, block it constantly. As we said in the previous paragraphs, this will become part of your work routine with the store. It is bound to happen and the only way to do it is to put up all the barriers we can and be on the lookout for any malicious domains.
Combat robots in your forms, it is simple, integrate the captcha module that we offer and that way you will forget about the annoying emails with undesirable content. for the rest, you have to work with certain periodicity.
We will continue to address this issue in future editions, both of this entry and others of related topics, as it seems to us that it is one of the great evils of the Internet of which, unfortunately, we have become so accustomed that we have already assimilated it as “normal”, when it really is not.
cheers and good ecommerce!
Deja un comentario