Are your website stats being manipulated?

By:
Easy Weddings
/
Updated on: December 18, 2014

are your website stats being manipulated?

A number of our clients are noticing an increase in traffic referrals from, in particular, two websites, buttons-for-website.com / referral and semalt.semalt.com / referral, and the result of this traffic is an increased bounce rate, which is not a good thing for your overall statistics.

It’s not that the sites are intentionally malicious, but they are annoying in that they will distort your website traffic figures. So, the best solution is to remove them from your Google Analytics in order to gain a truer picture of who’s visiting your website and what they’re doing once they get there.

You can remove semalt from your traffic by visiting http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php and adding your URL to their Remove a Site from our Seed List option on this page. It usually takes about 30 minutes to be removed from their database completely.

However, you can also remove semalt – or buttons-for-website.com (or any other site, for that matter) – from your Google Analytics manually using the following instructions:

1) Click on Behaviour > Site Content >> All Pages in the left-hand menu. When that loads, you’ll see the word “advanced” in the right hand corner next to the search field (as seen below).

how to remove semalt

2) Click on the word “advanced” and a new bar will appear that looks like the one below. SCroll down to “Exclude” in the drop-down menu called “Include” and in the blank field to the right of the button that says “Containing,” start typing in ‘se’ or ‘bu’ for either of the services you wish to remove from your traffic statistics.

A relevant URL (such as semalt.com / referal) will appear in the drop-down list, so select it before hitting Apply.

removing selmat

3) Now, every time you look at your statistics, the offending links will be excluded from your data giving you a much truer picture of what’s going on with your website’s traffic.

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