Did Google remove ghost referral spam from analytics in February and March 2016 such that it would look like traffic to my site declined?

Question

There was quite a sudden turn around in traffic (which had been rising) on one of the sites I manage. This started around February/March 2016. I searched to see if it was something others experienced and only found three blog-posts which suggested Google was somehow removing (at least some of the) ghost referral spam from Google Analytics reporting.

Is this true?

http://www.thesempost.com/google-analytics-referral-spam-removed/ http://howidoseo.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/ghost-referral-spam-is-gone.html

https://www.bigredseo.com/google-analytics-traffic-drop-feb-2016-dont-panic-yet/

Answer 1

February 2016 and early March were quiet months for spam in Google Analytics.

In mid-March, 2016, rankchecker.online began annoying may websites. In mid-June, it morphed into site-auditor.online.

In late May, monetizationking.net started up, and recently (October) morphed into 24x7-server-support.site.

In the last week of April, first week of May, there was a flurry of fake direct visits to non-existent landing pages, fake organic search keywords, fake Twitter and Facebook referrals.

There have been a couple of hundred other spam sources, mostly of smaller volume and short duration.

Complete information about the spam problem and current filter expressions are available here: http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/