Almost all my traffic from spam sites. SEO help!

[noslenwerd]

Below is a screenshot of my referrals in the google analytics dashboard. I never signed up for any shady traffic referral services, so I am wondering how I can stop the traffic from these sites?

Will google penalize me for getting this traffic?

Thanks!

[matcha]

Hi, I got many free-share-buttons.com referrals too I think it’s just traffics that are sent by those social buttons, I don’t think you need to worry about these. But the get-free-traffic-now.com I reckon those are self-marketing campaigns. They send you free traffic to get into your adwords to entice your their traffic capabilities and maybe get a customer.

[jeffreylees]

Google isn’t going to penalize you (SEO-wise) for the traffic. If the statistics bother you, you can research methods to block or reject various referrers, etc. But there’s no significant harm in them until they start overloading your hosting platform, for a small site or application.

[agtunn]

Google will never penalize you for traffic, these are referral spam to google analytics. Just not to get link look spammy that way

[inkovic]

Please read this blog post about referral spam by Mike Sullivan, it clarifies a lot of misconceptions about it:
http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12/removing-referral-spam-google-analytics/

You have to understand that this is usually an exploitation of Google Analytics and it is not real traffic, merely ‘ghost’ traffic.

It is a never-ending fight in your pursuit of keeping pristine analytics data - but that is it.

Google will not punish your for this - and will never punish your website based on the type of traffic* it receives with the exception of bounce rate** as a search quality measure.

* Adsense excepted
** Note: The way bounce rate is measured in Google Analytics vs how it is used as a rank factor is different. In GA, bounce rate is determined by site interaction. Bounce Rate in Google SERPs in determined if a user returns to the Search Engine Results Page shortly after visiting your page (i.e. via the back button), meaning their search intent wasn’t satisfied.