Referrer spam

General questions
1

I was getting a lot of referrer spam on one of my websites using Google Analytics, so I switched to Piwik. After a few months spam-free, I’m starting to see a few spam visits show in my logs. Some from ‘buttons-for-your-website.com’ Is there anyway to combat this? A lot of people recommend blocking the URL in Apache, for example, but that doesn’t always work as the hostname can be different.

2

I use a .htaccess file. An extract of the file follows. Remember that the string match is for a “is contained in” condition, so you don’t have to give the entire text of the referrer.

Because of a very stupid rule in this forum, you need to remove the spaces around the “n” in the string “mo n ey”. This dumb forum software won’t let me post the correct spelling of that word.


RewriteEngine on
# block visitors referred from semalt.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC,OR]
# block visitors referred from savetubevideo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} savetubevideo\.com [NC,OR]
# block visitors referred from kambasoft.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} kambasoft\.com [NC,OR]
# block visitors referred from makemo n eyonline.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} makemo n eyonline\.com [NC,OR]
# block visitors referred from best-seo-{whatever}
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} best-seo- [NC,OR]
# block visitors referred from buttons-for-{whatever}
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for- [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

There are other rules dealing with various UA’s that I don’t allow on my site.

3

Thanks @canajun2eh, very helpful!

4

Hi there,

We wrote a blog post about stopping Referrer Spam: Stopping Referrer Spam - Analytics Platform - Matomo

5

Hi,

currently I’m running Piwik 2.14.0 but I still have referer spam in my referer list on the dashboard. :frowning:

Is there any setting I need to tweak to activate spam blocking?

6

I am using Wordfence and added referrers sites in advanced blocking. But still some new ones are not blocked.

7

Hi there,

Feel free to try again installing with the latest 2.15.0 beta version which includes many fixes and improvements, see: I would like to test early beta and RC releases, how do I enable automatic updates to use these development versions? - Analytics Platform - Matomo

If you still have a problem, please create an issue on our tracker GitHub - matomo-org/piwik: Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. Matomo is the leading open alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites, apps & the IoT and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. We love Pull Requests!