I'm trying to determine what could cause an influx of referrer spam traffic in Google Analytics. My company launched a website in September. Since the launch, the website has seen a slow but steady increase of traffic. Last month we suddenly saw a sharp drop in organic traffic, and an increase in spam referrer traffic (which made up 50% of our visits for November). I've created filters to stop this from happening again, but I was wondering if there are specific causes of this type of spam traffic, especially occurring over a short period of time and very suddenly.
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Two things: one, traffic often drops around this time of the year and will not pick up again until mid-January due to the holidays; and two, there is no cause of referrer spam except that there are bad people out there who see it fit to cheat to get ahead. It is nothing to worry about. Keep building your filters. As a side-note, it is a true shame that Google does not take this head-on. It should be making them extremely mad - afterall, it is effecting their business negatively at least in customer perception anyway. Google being a virtual monopoly seems to make them apathetic - true or not.– closetnocCommented Dec 2, 2015 at 16:57
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the entire IPv4 address space can be scanned in about an hour and so can they also make spam referrer requests. Why not block them? These IPs are mostly servers not real visitors, like OVH.– user11732Commented Dec 4, 2015 at 17:54
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