Due to various big changes in my life, I haven’t had a chance to check in on this website in while.  Imagine my surprise when I sat down to check my traffic and discovered that in the past month I have nearly quadrupled my traffic!  Given that I haven’t updated the site in over two months, I was naturally a little suspicious. 

If you have a website you know exactly what happened next.

I opened up my referral report in Google Analytics and sure enough, all my precious new traffic is coming from 2 domains:

• semalt.com
• kambasoft.com.

Fortunately, Google has made it fairly easy to block referral spam (if not obvious).

1. Navigate to the “Admin” tab for the site. 
2. Select the correct account in the “Account” column to the left.
3. Select your website from the “Property” column in the middle.
4. In the “Property” column, click “Tracking Info”.
5. Several options will appear underneath “Tracking Info”, click on “Referral Exclusion List”.
6. Press the “Add Referral Exclusion” button and type the appropriate domain in the text box.
7. Press the “Create” button to add the domain to the exclusion list.

Unfortunately, this won’t retroactively block the spam, so you will still see it in reports until enough time has passed, but at least you can get a more accurate picture of your traffic going forward.