Semalt Conveys Crucial Information On How To Block Referrer Spam Using Nginx
When digging into your analytics software looking for opportunities and ideas, you may have come across some referral spams. These referrals have been in existence for quite a long time, but Darodar has taken them to another level.
Ivan Konovalov, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, says that Darodar is a bogus SEO tool, which has hijacked the botnet. It came up with a new way of advertisement where it uses a strategy whereby your website will be flooded by different IPs, countries and even devices at different times but all of them will have the same referral. They hope that as soon as you notice this suspicious traffic, you'll want to investigate more about it and in the long run, you will purchase their products.
When Darodar succeeded with this type of advertisement, most websites started using referral spam, and it has reached a point of corrupting and distorting the website analytics. It has become one of the major website offenders.
Why is referrer spam becoming an issue?
Other than distorting and corrupting your site with irrelevant data, spam is a big waste of time. Most people complain about how frustrating this can be when trying to explain about Darodar to customers and why they should ignore it. Although it is possible to create a filter using Google Analytics to help in filtering out the referrer spammers, the only thing this solution does is masking the problem.
Once spammers crawl or visit your site, they start using your server's resources, yet they are not things that you need. Loading your server means it becomes slow to load, which can lead to high bounce rates and poor rankings.
The key to stopping this issue is to block it before it gets a chance to register on your website as a referrer. There are different ways to achieve this goal, and one of them is to use nginx. Just follow the steps below:
Create the following global nginx rules directory:
sudo mkdr/etc/nginx/global
sudonano/etc/nginx/global/referee spam. conf
After creating the directory, paste the text below in the editor, then save it and exit;
##
# Referrer exclusions
##
if ($http_referer ~ " (semalt\.com|buttons-for-website\.com) ") {
set $prohibited "1";
}
if ($prohibited) {
return 403;-+
}
These steps will help you in detecting and blocking button for website.com and darodar.com. These two are the major website offenders, but you can still block any other referral spam that you wish. The consistent expression syntax takes the hostname, emit the periods with a backline and join them with a bar.
To the site's configuration file, add;
Server {
... all the stuff that is already ...
include/etc/nginx/global/*
}
Repeating this process can be boring since you have to do it for each site, but the goog thing is that you can use it again in future by adding new global directories in /etc/nginx/global/directory. If your website has a template file, it will be great if you add the line to it.
To ensure that there are no typing errors by following this:
Sudo nginx –t, then reload Nginx config, and from here, your site will be good to go.